OSINT At Home #8 – Calculate time using shadows in a photo or video

This tutorial is part 8 of the OSINT At Home series. It covers how to find out when an image or video was taken using shadows. This is a form of verification and documentation referred to as ’chronolocation’, and generally follows the process of geolocation. It is part of a useful skillset in image forensics. Using the shadows in a photo or video can help us identify or verify when something was taken. Sometimes we either have no metadata in an image or a video, or we simply cannot rely upon it, so a way to either double-check the legitimacy of a timestamp, or to find a window of time, is by turning objects seen in imagery into a sundial. We’ve all seen sundials, and have observed how they work, so digitally, any object can be turned into one, so long as we can see a shadow. It should be noted that doing a shadow calculation is just one way to identify the time of when something was taken, and that there are a number of other ways such as looking at the metadata, using s