Iphone 3g tech question

[Shooty*]

Guys,
Tech question. An issue has come up in one of my cases:

It concerns an iphone 3g, and the metadata and image size thereof.

If someone took an image on their iphone 3g (not gs) and sent it by MMS, what resolution would it be received as by the recipient? 800x600?

Cheers

[Spud1]

May not be the exact answer you are looking for, but I believe that it depends on the receiving network and handset.

It will send it out in the biggest size that the network allows, and this may well be 1024x768, but this image will get processed before the recipient gets it, to make sure that their phone can display the content. So sending it to an old nokia for example may only give you a 640x480 image. Sometimes it is done on the size of the image file too - so there may be a limit of say 300kb, meaning that you can get images of different resolutions depending on the image content (some images may be say 290kb @ 1024x768 whilst some could be 320kb..so the latter would be resized to 800x600). This is why if you send an MMS to a non MMS enabled phone, they get a text with a link to a website where they can view it.

So in short its what I started with - depends on the network(s) and receiving handset.

[Shooty*]

I've got the strangest situation... someone has taken a photo, and says that they found it on their computer.

The photo is 800 x 600. The metadata says it was taken with an iphone on x date and provides gps locations, time, all that good stuff. I've played around with copying files, altering them, MMSing them, straight transfer to a PC, and as far as I can tell there's no way to "infect" the metadata to say it was taken on anything other than an iphone unless it actually WAS so taken. Yet the woman who took it swears blind she found it on her computer, took it two years previous, and didn't use an iphone.

She could be lying... on the basis of the metadata, I think she is...

[chrestomanci]

Obvously it is possible to manualy edit the metadata on an image, but most people would not think to do that. I have another theory.

Is it possible that someone opened an image taken on an iPhone, replaced the actual image data with a different picture, and then saved the image? In most image editors the file would keep the original metadata, even though it no longer matches the picture, and a lot of people have strange habits in how they use applications.

For example lots of people rarely use the "compose new email" button in outlook, instead they just find an old message in their inbox from the person they are trying to mail, and reply to it, removing all of the original message. This results in emails with different metadata, which sometimes causes confusion on mailing lists.

[Shooty*]

Good call, but I think this person took the photo totally ignorant of metadata, and basically expected everyone to believe that it was taken some time before it actually way.