Global News had forensics experts analyze the photo that was provided separately to both Gawker and the Toronto Star by the same person who later showed them the alleged video showing someone matching the appearance of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking what could be crack cocaine. The Mayor told the media that the allegations were “ridiculous.”

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According to the Star, when they first met the man claiming to have the video, he showed a photo of Ford dressed in sweatpants, standing in the driveway of a brick house with three other men. A Global News investigation into the image shows that there doesn’t appear to have been any tampering with the image itself, rather any tampering that did occur happened in the multiple re-saving of the image.

Hany Farid, the Chief Technology Officer at the image authentication firm Fourandsix technologies and a Professor at Dartmouth College, said the photo was pretty low quality making it difficult to say anything definitive, however he ruled out any major ‘photoshopping’ of the image. “I can say that there are no obvious signs of manipulation in terms of, for example, one person’s head being spliced onto the head of another.”

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An Error Level Analysis of the image shows no clear high values differentiation. fotoforensics.com

A second expert who specializes in computer forensics and has a Ph.D. in computer science, also emphasized the low quality of the image but added that there were clearly multiple re-saves of the file and that it was cropped in the process. “The chain of custody is definitely tampered and obscured.” The expert to whom we promised confidentiality, suggested that the plausible explanation is that someone took the picture, cropped the image and possibly blurred the faces at that time, and then the two media outlets did their own re-saving of the image.

John Cook, the author of the Gawker piece, confirmed to Global News that Gawker did crop the image, added some text layering, and added the blurring of faces but that nothing else was done to the photo.

Global News’ own error level analysis of the image using online forensics tools shows no major discrepancies in the intensity of the image.

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For every re-save of the image it would appear darker and so if any tampering is done to particular portions of the image, those would appear in a lighter shade than the rest of the photo.

Using exifdata.com to analyse the image metadata, the resolution of the image is 545×365 which is not an industry standard photo size. According to the forensics expert, at minimum, the image was cropped and someone added a border to each side. This is consistent with what John Cook told Global News.

Global News also scanned for any duplication with existing images to see if cropping occurred using reverse image search tools TinEye and Google. A scan of more than 2.6 billion images showed no duplication.

We have no way of knowing if the photo of the mayor with the men has any relation to the video in question.