Verify before you cite

Before an image goes in your report, your article, or your evidence file, two questions deserve an answer: where did it come from, and has it been changed since?

Verify before you cite means answering both questions before the citation, not after a correction. A C2PA Content Credentials read plus a capture-time metadata check answers both in seconds, and both checks are free. This page is the whole method; the downloadable pack turns it into 12 copy-paste recipes.

Why this is a habit and not a tool

Images fail quietly. A photo gets cropped, re-encoded, or re-captioned somewhere between the event and your source, and every republication looks equally confident. In an August 2026 sweep of 73 images that 38 companies publicly present as AI-generated or AI-altered, 72 carried no C2PA Content Credentials at all as delivered; the full method and row-level results are in the sweep write-up. The takeaway cuts both ways: a missing credential is normal and proves nothing, and a validated credential is real evidence worth thirty seconds to check for.

The four steps

1. Run one keyless check. Upload the image at the free verifier, or from a terminal: curl -X POST https://chronoverify.com/v1/verify -F "file=@photo.jpg". No key, no account; the free path is rate limited per IP.
2. Read the verdict like an analyst. You get one of five verdict values with a confidence score, plus a capture_time block and a c2pa block. A validated credential is strong provenance. An absent one is normal, most credential loss is mechanical, and it is not evidence the image is fake. What the pipeline can and cannot tell you is documented at /method.
3. Get a free key for repeat checks. POST /v1/keys/free with an email grants 100 verifications per month, no card, key shown once. The form on the pricing page does the same thing in the browser.
4. Put the check in front of every citation. The free Verify Before You Cite pack is 12 recipes plus a drop-in agent prompt that makes the check a standing step: what to run, what each answer means for the citation, and the wording to use when provenance is unverified. Pay what you want, $0 minimum, and the files are identical either way.

What this method does not do

It does not detect AI-generated images or deepfakes, and it does not prove a photo is authentic. It establishes what the file itself carries: capture-time metadata, validated Content Credentials or their absence, and signs of editing worth a human look. That is the half of image verification the file can answer; reverse image search, geolocation, and the other external checks are cataloged in the image OSINT toolbox.

The rest of the catalog, including the research agents and prompt packs for source verification, is at /packs.