#reverse-image-search
8 writeups ·all writeups
Convoy — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A wire photo stripped of its caption. The work isn't recognising the scene — it's proving the metadata is really gone, then recovering the caption from syndication.
Everyone Knows the Face — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
One reverse image search identifies the photograph. The points are in two details on the same page: a pseudonym, and a date that isn't the date of the event.
House Hunting — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A screened gazebo, no landmarks, no signage, no readable text. The whole challenge is knowing that the object is the index — and that the listing is the authority on spelling.
Meeting — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
An OSINT wire-photo challenge that hinges less on the identification and more on two format traps: an underscore that isn't a separator, and an official spelling that most news sources get 'wrong'.
Op Sindoor — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A single interior photograph, nine candidate sites, and a naming convention that decides whether a correct identification still scores.
A Taste of Influence, Part 1 — The Flag in the Avatar
A ten-second solve of the OSINT challenge A Taste of Influence Part 1: the flag was in the Gronda profile picture, and the stylised logo pins the year.
Finding a Norwegian Farmhouse Brewery From One Photo
Hacktoria GEOINT. No EXIF, no signs, no text. Here's how I got from an unmarked Scandinavian valley down to a single building — and the shortcut I ignored for six hours.
The Challenge Was Called DEPIX. Depix Was the Wrong Tool.
A pixelated boarding pass, a perfectly readable PDF417 barcode, and neither of them mattered. The solve took sixty seconds — and the only real trap in the challenge had nothing to do with the censoring.