Metadata Trail

The album from the previous stage contained one image that did not belong: a scan of an old photograph, edited and re-saved by the suspect long after it was taken.

His editor stamped the save with a recent date. But a scan with no original date breaks a library sorted by capture date, so he did what every meticulous archivist does: he opened the properties and typed in the year the photo was actually taken. The editor wrote it back into the file as the original capture date.

He fixed the timeline. He never thought of it as evidence.

The scan date is recent and means nothing. The date he entered by hand is the one that matters to him, the year he anchors to, the one he would obviously reach for in a passphrase.

Submit that year.