[29] Intro to OSINT Episode 3: Reverse Image Search

I bet Toler came up with some excuse , something must have gone wrong, attempting to frame some innocent Russian which is the purpose of Bellingcat, funded by the US and UK governments.

Easy again- the plate on the van is blue on the top and yellow. I knew this was New York. I cropped the church and reverse image searched yandex. Brought up this church at another angle. Sure enough new York! It’s Sunrise Church of Christ in Buffalo’s East Side

Very late to the party but why not?
1. Right clicked the image and looked at its properties in Windows and saw it said "A Church in Buffalo NY"
2. Google image searched "gothic church buffalo ny" (which I'm not even sure is the right architecture term) and it brought me to something that looked similar, on an article called "The Clocks of Buffalo", which I skimmed and found the church.
St Ann's Roman Catholic Church in Buffalo, NY (On Broadway)

I wasn't married to the concept of it being in Buffalo because it's easy to mislabel things, so the next step would've been reverse image searching or looking for landmarks, probably.

I tend to have luck with Tineye

Focused on the blue-topped fire hydrant; image search led to a photographer in Central NY. Went from there to searching for Catholic churches in Central NY (!). Having now learned about exiftool, this got much easier...

I use reverse search a ton. All of them yield results differently. Usually I just am looking for the original source of an image someone posted that should have another near-identical copy on some other website, so I know what I am looking for.

Did a Bing image search cropped to just the church — as you suggested. Got a match on Flickr. Flickr page included map. Clicking that provided lat/long. Pasted that into Apple Maps and got the building name and address — St Ann's in Buffalo, NY.

Used exiftool to see that the location is listed as Buffalo, NY. I then noticed tall buildings in the background, so googled for the tallest buildings in buffalo to find the names of the buildings so I knew where to look with google earth. Turns out the church (Church of St. Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr) is on the wikipedia list of tall buildings, so I just went to the address listed on there and verified it was the right location, on the intersection between Emslie Street and Broadway, looking South East East.

I've never had much success with reverse image searches with a number of "engines" so hopefully next time I'll remember this video and try some of these new ideas out.

It's Saint Ann's Church on 651 Broadway St Buffalo, NY

I started by downloading the image and checking it's properties and lo and behold - there's a clue, "Subject: A Church in Buffalo NY".

I simply put that into Google and browsed through images until I found the church named "St. Ann's Church".
After trying to search for it on Google Maps to no avail, I turned back to Google to find out that the church was closed in 2008.
I also stumbled upon it's Facebook page "Saint Ann's Church and Shrine, Buffalo NY", which had the address. Putting that into Google Maps confirmed it.

I used exiftool to look at the picture metadata.
The subject of the photo is: "A Church in Buffalo NY"
So I dropped to google reverse image search with the added terms of "church buffalo NY".
It is Saint Ann's Church & Shrine (confirmed with street view with the exact angle of that picture).

St. Ann Catholic Church, Buffalo, NY (address of photo 683 Broadway, Buffalo, NY) - I liked that google image search didn't pull this immediately so I tried Bing for the first time.
Using Bing's visual search and crop region feature I focused on just the church. I few scrolls down and there is was...a photo from winter time.
Thanks again. I really Enjoy these.

I was surprised by how quickly I was able to get the location. Spoilers: St. Ann's Church in Buffalo, NY, viewed from the corner of Broadway and Emslie on Google Street View.
I first noticed the New York license plates on the cars (thank you, Hollywood for making that plate one of about three I can instantly recognize), and did a reverse Google image search, looking for pages mentioning New York.
The first result was an article about St. Ann's, so with a name, I looked it up on Google Maps to confirm, and realized not just that I was right, but that the image was from Street View, since the clouds are the same.

Found it. I had never tried yandex before so i had to start with that... and it was good. Holy ****. Couple minutes and I had the name of the church. St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Buffalo’s East Side. Google gave me an address for 651 Broadway St, East Side, Buffalo, NY. After for some reason to trying suggest that I was looking for St. Stanislaus B&M Roman Catholic Church.

Its the St Anne Catholic Church, specifically taken at the crossing of Emslie st and Broadway, Buffalo, New York. Here's my reasoning.
I really didn't want to use image search as it was mentioned in this video already. I decided to first check the exif data through an online checker. No result, as further looking shows the google street view watermark on your photo (by the fire hydrant). I then noticed the blue capped fire hydrant but that came up empty as that just shows its a high flow rate hydrant. I found the street was privately maintained because of the blue street signs but again, no clue as to where this was. Image searching on Yandex pulled up a church in what I assume is Russia, this was no match as the Russian churches' peaks were flat while this one was spiked. Further scrolling revealed a Wikipedia entry on Buffalo, New York. A quick visit to that tiny entry shows the image clear as day. Below the photo showed the location, google street view to the rescue, and now I can see exactly where you took your screenshot!

Edit: Another detail I just noticed, the license plate on the oncoming car is a yellow plate with a black header. Googling yellow license plate confirms that it is indeed a New York plate. Doesn't help terribly but fun fact I suppose.

Okay. found it.
(Space for spoiler reasons)
.
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It's St. Ann Catholic Church, Buffalo, NY
I noticed the license plate was pretty distinct and a Wikipedia list of all American license plates (the do have a list for everything) gave me New York.
So I spend the next 20 minutes looking at pictures of New York churches. Did you know there are about 2000 churches in the New York area? Now I do. Also that led me nowhere.
So I tried the Bing image search with cropping on the church and that gave me the church in like 40 seconds.
But now I know that New York has a bunch of really pretty and some very ugly churches.

I subscribed like an hour ago, what luck!

St Anns RC Church Rectory
 42.890558°,-78.849199°
I used Yandex reverse image search.
It took me to the Buffalo, New York wiki page that which mentioned the St Anns RC Church Rectory and showed a picture.

Trried Google & Bing image reverse search, because those are the first ones that come in mind. No result. Check the article you posted, glanced over, saw "Yandex is by far the best reverse image search engine". Uploaded the picture, no definitive result. Cropped the image to the building itself, a hit! Clicked on the image, linked to a Wikipedia article "Buffalo, New York". Image is on the article titled "St. Ann Catholic Church and Shrine, Buffalo.". Google that, address is "501 Emslie St, Buffalo, NY 14212".

Awesome stuff. i Find That a big breakfast helps make good videos. Enjoy your day :D