# Practical Analyses of How Common Social Media Platforms and Photo Storage Services Handle Uploaded Images

## TL;DR

This study investigates how Facebook, Flickr, and Google Photos modify uploaded images, analyzing digital fingerprints, filename conventions, and developing methods to estimate upload dates and identify Facebook photos from filenames.

## Contribution

It introduces new approaches for estimating Flickr upload dates and identifying Facebook photos using filename analysis, enhancing digital image forensics.

## Key findings

- Developed methods to estimate Flickr upload dates regardless of user modifications.
- Revealed Facebook photo IDs from filename analysis.
- Provided comprehensive data on image modifications across platforms.

## Abstract

The research done in this study has delved deeply into the changes made to digital images that are uploaded to three of the major social media platforms and image storage services in today's society: Facebook, Flickr, and Google Photos. In addition to providing up-to-date data on an ever-changing landscape of different social media networks' digital fingerprints, a deep analysis of the social networks' filename conventions has resulted in two new approaches in (i) estimating the true upload date of Flickr photos, regardless of whether the dates have been changed by the user or not, and regardless of whether the image is available to the public or has been deleted from the platform; (ii) revealing the photo ID of a photo uploaded to Facebook based solely on the file name of the photo.