u/jindoe0

Hi all, a good friend of mine (L) recently received pictures that her partner (C) said had been sent to her over Instagram by a burner account (who blocked her shortly after). These pictures depict L cheating on C with a random person neither of them had seen before, but they looked convincing enough. I know L and know that cheating goes against everything she stands for, and I'd bet my life on these being faked somehow; either AI generated or edited in some way.

L has her suspicions on who could be behind the pictures, but she can't begin to take legal action (defamation case) without some ground to stand on regarding these suspicions. Thing is, I'm a complete amateur in digital forensics, so try as I might I have only been able to get the pure basic metadata from these photos. The photos themselves have also been through a lot of sending and re-sending on different platforms, and I believe only one of the ones I have is an "original" in any regard; the others are screenshots.

So my question is, is there anybody here who could help? Either with the forensics aspect of it (which I believe I've reached a dead-end in, but again, I'm only an amateur) or with the visual analysis/AI identification part of it? We'd be super grateful.

Roughly six months ago, I made this post to this subreddit which blew up a little! I am now happy to report that, in part thanks to the advice of the very helpful folks over here, the frame managed to make a full recovery. In fact, I believe it is more stable now than it was before it broke! The craftsmanship is not the best obviously, and the plank of wood is quite literally an abandoned piece of junk I found in one of the common rooms of my apartment building, but all's well that ends well no?

Now, to answer some of the biggest questions and other comments in the replies from the original post (which, by the way, were a joy to read. I read the funniest ones out loud to my friends, it was great):

"What were you doing for it to break like that??"
- As funny as all of the sex jokes were, the reality was far more mundane (or not, depending on how you see it?). At the time, I was part of a student association, whose board had five other members. We usually had our meetings in my room, with several of us sitting on the bed at once. For society yearbook photos, we thought it'd be funny to take our picture all piled onto my bed. As you might have guessed, having the weight of six people distributed over the bed was not the best idea. It was a miracle it hadn't broken before that, in hindsight. We did get our photos though!
Various literature/book-based puns inspired by the books I was using to support the frame
- I love you guys
The specific thread where someone said "and this guy suggested the toe splitter"
- This became a running joke with my friends, which only got funnier after I repeatedly stubbed my toes on the load-bearing pile of books
Several variations of "haha fat joke"
- Y'all need to get more creative lmao. Except for the dude who said "lighter ass", we cried laughing at that one, you're exempt.

Help finding device information/geolocation in photo metadata?

UPDATE: Best long-lasting fix?