I have a number of users who are performing human trafficking, child exploitation or violent crime investigations using Hunchly. Many times these investigations involve a lot of imagery, and not all of it is contained on metadata-stripping social media networks.

For the rest of the sites out there, there is still the ability for investigators to grab images and then attempt to extract Exif data from it.

This post will cover how to use Hunchly to tag photos and then process those photos in bulk with ExifTool so that you can quickly review all of the captured metadata.

Tagging Photos in Hunchly

This is pretty simple. Find an image you want to tag, right click on it, and in the Hunchly popup menu simply select: Tag Image

Tagging photos with Hunchly.

Pretty straightforward. The images you tag are now stored in your current case.

This is a pretty cool feature of Hunchly: he preserves all metadata.

Both when he is doing regular content snapshots of each page, and when you are doing image tagging. All of the images are pristinely preserved.

Exporting Images from Hunchly

Once you have tagged a few photos, its time to export them from Hunchly. This is handled automatically in a case export which you can do in a single mouse click from your Case Screen.

Case exported in Hunchly.

Clicking the Full Case (.zip) button will generate a case export, and then you can click the link which will pull the case zip file into your Downloads folder.

Unzip the case file and you will see a photos directory. This has all of your tagged photos.

Now we are ready to use ExifTool to process all of them.

Extracting Metadata with ExifTool

First step is to download ExifTool which you can do from here.

I will be using the Windows version, but much like Hunchly you can use Windows, Mac or Linux.

Save it to your Desktop and unzip the file.

On Windows once you extract the zip file you will want to change the filename so we can use it from the command line:

Rename exiftool(-k) to exiftool

Perfect. Now copy the photos folder into your exiftool folder so that we can begin extracting the metadata.

You will use the Windows command line to do the next bit. Hit your Start menu and type: cmd into the search box.

From there we need to change into the exiftool directory and then run the tool:

cd Desktop\exiftool-10.36

exiftool.exe -csv photos > exif.csv

Beauty! Now you will have an exif.csv file in the ExifTool directory.

Reviewing the Results

If you crack the exif.csv file open in Microsoft Excel (or your favourite spreadsheet software) you will be able to easily review the results of all of the metadata you have extracted.

If you are on Excel, save yourself some headache and select the whole sheet and then from the Format menu hit Column -> Autofit Selection

This will allow you to scroll through the various fields looking for pieces of information that you can perform further research into. Awesome right?