#reverse-image-search
13 writeups · all writeups
What a Dump! A Deleted Reddit Comment and the Alley It Named
Bellingcat Urban Exploration. A graffiti-covered dumpster in an unnamed alley, no location metadata. Google Lens on the Goof Troop graffiti led to a 2018 Reddit post whose location comments a mod had removed — recovered via Arctic Shift to Morse Street in DC's Union Market.
Cyrillic Confusion: Tracing the Yi Peng 3 Port Log Back to Its Source
Bellingcat Maritime Mysteries. A screenshot of a translated port log for the YUI PENG 3, the ship suspected of cutting two Baltic cables. Google Lens, a German forum, Yandex and the Wayback Machine lead back to the Russian port authority page it came from.
Fully Stocked: In Which City Is This Container Ship Moored?
Bellingcat Maritime Mysteries. A container ship at the quay, no EXIF, no caption. Google Lens found the photo on a dozen sites, one of them leaked a Pexels file name, and the original on Pexels is tagged Hamburg. The cranes and the bridge in the frame confirm it.
A Sticky Situation: Naming a Tyrolean Summit From the Stickers on Its Cross
Bellingcat Globetrotters. One photo of a sticker-covered summit box and a view over an Alpine valley. A QR code, a date search on X and a Google Maps user photo narrowed it from all of Austria to one cross.
Flamin-Go Find It!: Which Zoo Keeps These 31 Flamingos?
Bellingcat Challenge. A photo of a flock of flamingos at a pool, no EXIF, no sign. Leg bands said zoo, Google Lens said Seattle, and labelled stock photos of the same enclosure confirmed it.
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.