Photography Chain of Custody Experiment

Projects change. Photographs move from person to person, from tool to tool. A crime-scene photo passes from the investigator’s camera to a forensic analyst’s workstation to a prosecutor’s presentation software. A heritage digitisation travels from the conservator’s studio through an editor’s desktop to a public archive. At each step someone asks: is this still the original file, or has it been altered? The Chain of Custody library answers that question with cryptography, not blind trust. Photo-Verify proof of concept I talked a while back about how, in a world of AI, chain of trust becomes the only mechanism that can maintain the integrity of photographic information. I reused the idea for my book which was nearly entirely on that subject. Someone mentioned in my Substack comments recently that it would be a good idea to have a mechanism for that. The idea in short is that you trust some photographers because of reputation, because you know them, or because you know someone you trust…