Okay, so heres the deal... Someone in my college class sent a picture around of the final exam and the professor found out about the image. He says if the person turns themselves in he won't make the entire class write four of the final essays that were originally supposed to be one of. My question is, is if I have the original image is there any way to get any data off of it? Like the serial number so I can run it through a camera finder like site, if possible?
The best tool I know of for this is
exiftool. it will extract ALL Exif data from the image. It's cross platform also, so will run in windows, mac or linux. The bad news is, it's a command-line tool, so you'll need to drop into terminal (mac/linux) or cmd.exe (windows) and run it that way. basically, you drop into the directory where the image is sitting and type
And it will spit out all the exif data embedded in the photo.
What kind of info is in there though, depends a lot on the camera. Some cameras (like most dSLR models) will embed things like the serial number of the camera and what lens was attached, so it's very detailed. An iPhone though, will not embed any serial number info, so you won't be able to directly trace the image that way.
It's still worth a try though. At the very least you should be able to get the model of the phone or camera used to take the image, what date and time (which should be fairly accurate on a smartphone), and GPS coordinates, indicating where they were when the image was taken (though the accuracy of that probably isn't good enough to single out a person in a room with a group of people inside).
How useful the info is depends on a lot of factors. If they were using an Android phone that maybe embeds serial number info, then you might be able to track the person down. Or, maybe they're the only student in the class with a Blackberry Z10, and the photo was taken from that model phone.
Of course, if the person taking the image was smart, they could've wiped the EXIF data from the image before sharing it with anyone. Then you'd have nothing to go on.