Last year, an estimated 1.1tn photographs were captured by both still and mobile devices, and this figure is expected to reach over 1.4tn by the end of 2020.
Of these photographs, around 1.8bn smartphone images are uploaded to the internet every day, according to Mary Meeker.
A new company called TRUEPIC believes that despite the massive volume of pictures available online, many people are mistrustful of the images they see, often expecting them to have been manipulated or edited.
TRUEPIC wants to try and reduce the number of edited and potentially deceiving images online, by launching a mobile app for both businesses and consumers that can confirm a photo’s authenticity.
Photos taken with the TRUEPIC mobile app cannot be altered, filtered or modified, enabling ” businesses to verify uploaded photos as accurate with 100% confidence, and consumers to share credibly unfiltered pictures anywhere on the web.”
To do this, TRUEPIC has launched a new SDK called Image Authenticity Platform for Enterprise, which lets businesses verify images easily.
When someone opens a camera within an app that has been integrated with TRUEPIC, the software is enabled and lets users take un-editable photos.
These images are then verified and watermarked with time-stamps and geo-codes, and a six-digit code is allocated to the photograph before it is stored in the company’s vault (it can be accessed again using the code).
On the business side, the Californian company hopes its technology can help to increase consumer trust, and is currently rolling out private beta tests of the software with insurance, online dating, home rental, classifieds and beauty companies.
Speaking about the potential use cases for businesses, TRUEPIC said insurance carriers could authenticate photos submitted with insurance claims, images on Airbnb-style home rental platforms could be verified, dating profile pictures can be confirmed as current and unfiltered, and beauty companies could demonstrate real results for consumers.
TRUEPIC also has a consumer-focused mobile app, which enables users to take and share unedited photos in the same way as the business software, but within a standalone app.
The San Diego startup said: “Photo-sharing is at an all time high, but at the same time, images and videos are no longer trusted as accurate or authentic due to the ubiquity of online & mobile photo editing.
“As of March 2017, five of the top 10 free photo and video iOS apps are used for editing, modifying and/or filtering images and videos; a ratio that jumps to 9 of the top ten paid apps.
“As a result, online businesses – from insurance carriers, rental sites and classifieds to dating sites and beauty vendors – must be able to validate shared photos in order to stem the lost revenue bred from fraud and consumer mistrust.”
The company was founded in San Diego, California in 2016 by entrepreneurs Craig Stack and Jeff McGregor.
With the launch of the mobile app, the company also announced it had secured an impressive $1.75m in seed funding from a number of investors including FirstCall co-founder Jeffrey Parker, the founder & CEO of Platinum Technology and SilkRoad technology Andrew “Flip” Filipowski, and Harvard Business School professor and venture capitalist William Sahlman.
To find out more about TRUEPIC please click here.