How to Tell if a Photo is Real...or Really Of "The Thing" They Say It Is...

Twitter would have you believe that is is a photo of the Trayon Martin protests happening today. It is not.

While I love twitter for many things, including showing me what is going on in the world, it's not necessarily good at fact-checking.

This is a problem.

The photograph, which shows an improbably large crowd on the Golden Gate Bridge, is actually the crowd at the 50th anniversary of the bridge. (SOURCE: Guardian story on the bridge's 75th anniversary party)

It takes less than a minute to figure this out. Let me show you how.

1. Find and copy the image URL. You can usually get to this with a rightclick on the image. With some images, you may need to "view background image" first.
2. Go to Google and paste the image URL into the search field. Make sure it is only the file name and doesn't have additional text. Search for the filename.
3. Click the "Search by Image" link. (If you do not see that link, it usually means what you searched for is not a URL that resolves to an image.)
4. The resulting page should show you other copies of the image you searched for along with "similar" images. This should make it easy to figure out where the photo originated. Looking at the largest images is often helpful, since people shrink images but seldom enlarge them.

That's all it takes. Don't be part of the problem. Be part of the solution.