Metadata Interrogator

Hello,
First up, I don't want this to sound like an advert as I know how annoying they are - the software is free and I'm actively looking for feedback from other practitioners rather than trying to promote it. I built it as it was something I had a working need for, and I'd like to share it with you all and get your opinions.

I decided that I needed something that would pull out absolutely any and all metadata possible from files, and display it in a useful way. There are lots of options that sort of do the same thing (Jeffery's Exif tool etc.) but I had a few specific requirements (such as completely offline, portable, any file type, GUI interface etc.) which weren't met by others.

I've also tried to build in some counter fraud specific tools such as match and timeline analysis, highlighting important fields (like author names) and similar.

You can get it here if you're interested - www.metadataanalysis.com

As mentioned, I'd love your feedback and suggestions for new features.

Great tool you got here. Gave it a go and found it pretty interesting. Now i am really interested in the online training course you mentioned. Would check out the PDA website. Thanks.

Great tool you got here. Gave it a go and found it pretty interesting. Now i am really interested in the online training course you mentioned. Would check out the PDA website. Thanks.

Really glad you've found the tool useful - makes it all worth while to hear that people have enjoyed using it.

I've got a new release coming up which I think has some much better features (a much improved timeline, better data set analysis and so on) - I'll post here later once it's all cooked.

Just a quick message to say that I've just released a new version with a much fancier timeline, better data set and match analysis and a lot of performance improvements.

https://www.metadataanalysis.com/2019/02/22/v0-6-released/

Hi,
That's a great tool you've created there. Thank you.
I've had a play with it from various file types of my own that I know the history of.
On all the (Word) Docs it gives a "Creation Date" and "Created" row.
In all cases the former shows 01.01.1980 0000.00hrs and the latter gives me the times/date I created my document - precisely.
Can you tell me the intended difference between the two?
Thanks again.

Hi,
That's a great tool you've created there. Thank you.
I've had a play with it from various file types of my own that I know the history of.
On all the (Word) Docs it gives a "Creation Date" and "Created" row.
In all cases the former shows 01.01.1980 0000.00hrs and the latter gives me the times/date I created my document - precisely.
Can you tell me the intended difference between the two?
Thanks again.

Apologies for the delay,
Word metadata is a bit of a pain - it has a few fields which are just 'default' ones. Every Word doc will have 01.01.1980 0000.00hr as the Created date, as it's just saved in the metadata of every file (unless it's been overwritten specifically). I have no idea why, and it annoys me greatly.

Anyway, I've tried to get round this in a few ways - in the latest version (0.8) of Metadata Interrogator you'll see a row that says *Creation Date. This is a calculated date which tries to pick the best 'creation date' for a file. It does this by ignoring any default dates, and picking the earliest date in any of the creation metadata fields. Be warned it's not perfect, so make sure to double check yourself.

Dates and times are unfortunately one of the most difficult and unsure parts of dealing with metadata, which is frustrating as it should be some of the most useful data. Hope that helps!