Faking a timestamp?

[Android Question]

Hi everyone,
I have a question. Is it possible to fake or forge a timestamp? I recieved a picture from someone and I question the legitimadcy of the time it was taken. How difficult would it be for someone to forge the time stamp?

Below is how the stamp appears next to the image in my gmail/and at the top of the image when I open the image on my droid. Any help would be much appreciated!

2013-05-09_15-19-56_172.jpg

 

[Hadron]

If the "timestamp" is just the filename, as it seems to be from your description, then it would be trivial to change - you just edit the file name with any file explorer app, same as you can change the name of any other file.

If there are any exif data in the file that takes more effort (though not impossible). EXIF information is a standard way of storing info about the image - exposure information, information about the camera used, and also the data and time it was digitised. There are apps in the Play Store that will let you view exif data, or of course you can copy it to a computer where there are many other apps which can view this information.

If the date/time stored in the image differ from the filename that would be highly suspicious. However, it is possible to remove or edit these, so the date/time in the image data agreeing with the filename would not actually prove that it was legit, just that somebody knew enough to edit these as well.