Righto, listen up, mate. So, how’s a dud pic give the game away? When you, me old mate, get a custom drawing or whatever, you want it to look real, right? Even if it’s full of absolute bullshit. So you get this pic and you’re stoked, your ugly mug is sitting pretty on a fake licence. Looks tops, real as, couldn’t be better. But then your photo with your dial on it fails the authenticity check. What the bloody hell?! You start having a go at the artist, calling his work shoddy. But what actually happened? Let’s break it down. See, besides the actual picture, the visual stuff, there’s this other thing called metadata. Modern anti-fraud systems always give that a squiz. So what the hell is this metadata and what’s it all about? Metadata is the stuff that tells the true story about your photo, the bits you wanna hide: that your licence is as phony as a three-dollar bill, that you don’t have a car (not even a bloody Commodore, let alone a Lambo), and that you’re not 21, you’re just a little 18-year-old sprog. And no pub’s gonna serve you a cold one. And it also shows you didn’t take the snap in LA or the Big Apple, not even in London or Sydney, but in some absolute shithole south of the Mexican border. And to top it off, you knocked it up on your knees in Photoshop. So how do you beat the system and pass the authenticity check? You gotta tweak the metadata to say what you want: edit the time and place, get rid of the Photoshop fingerprints, and all that other stuff you don’t need to worry your pretty little head about, but the clued-up cunts know all about it.
Yeah, and this skill’s not just for fiddling with your own snaps, it’s also for calling out some smart arse who’s trying to spin you a yarn that he’s some big shot wheeler-dealer, when in reality, he’s just some bludger from the next suburb over.
Ask me how 😉
That is, unless that same bludger got his pics done by other clued-up buggers like us.