What happens when a photo editor needs to prove their image wasn't generated by Midjourney? Until recently, the honest answer was: not much.
OpenOrigins has released Secure Source, an app built to give photographers and media organizations a verifiable paper trail for their images. The system works by embedding a cryptographic signature into photos at capture time - essentially a tamper-proof timestamp that records who took the photo, when, and with what device. Anyone who receives the image can run it through OpenOrigins' verification system to confirm the metadata hasn't been altered.
The tool sits in the same space as Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative and the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) standard, which is a shared technical framework defining how digital content credentials should be structured and verified. OpenOrigins builds on these existing standards rather than creating something proprietary.
The practical use cases are narrow but real: photojournalists, legal evidence documentation, insurance claims, and any situation where the chain of custody of an image matters. As AI image generators produce increasingly realistic output, news organizations, courts, and insurance adjusters have growing reason to care about tools in this category.
Secure Source is available now at openorigins.com.