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At least that's what I might have done.
I can confirm there is no GPS coordinates embedded in the photo
In the actual photo? Is there any meta data? Is there any EXIF data? What was the photo filename, and what does searching for that (with increments up and down) return? To try and guess what happened:- 1) One of them followed you and got information. (You say this didn't happen.) 2) They had information about the event and worked from there. 3) There were other people in the photo, and they got face-matched, and thei…
I am positive they didn't have number 2
There were no other people in the photo
What other snippets of information would be useful?
And they never met her, only I did. So they didn't know her name. And yeah, I said "I met a cute girl." I didn't say I met "name"
I'm sure there's a lot of information missing from this story, which leads to a lot of possible solutions that aren't negated by the lack of limiting circumstances. More than likely the author is an idiot and the image had EXIF data. Considering they already knew her highschool, it wouldn't had been to hard to go through the year books in a few hours.
I resent the fact that you think I'm an idiot. I have had two engineers check for EXIF data and there is 'nothing interesting in there'
I still remember the time I said something impolite about David Brin. Brin took offense and replied.
I'm actually a huge fan of David Brin. That sucked.
At this point he could not see my screen (he was standing directly in
front of me), but offered me a simple bet – He said if I sent him the
picture of the girl he could find out her name.
Sky Masterson: One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a
brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy
is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of
this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not
accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind
up with an ear full of cider.
Simplest explanation: He knew before he made the bet.
I'm sure there's a lot of information missing from this story, which leads to a lot of possible solutions that aren't negated by the lack of limiting circumstances. More than likely the author is an idiot and the image had EXIF data. Considering they already knew her highschool, it wouldn't had been to hard to go through the year books in a few hours.
- This isn't the actual photo but looks similar, except that she was alone. Justin was afraid of reposting the same photo after the results of handing over a photo last time :)
- There was no useful exif data in the image.
- We knew her high school and approximate age in Austin, but were unable to find any yearbooks / class rosters online. (Idea not pursued: try to acquire a yearbook offline).
- Facebook Graph Search and LinkedIn with the criteria we knew didn't help.
- Google Image search didn't help.
> "I'm sure there's a lot of information missing from this story"
Quite true.
Ultimately we had several methods going at once to try to figure it out.
The one that came back with results first relies on some information Justin still doesn't know we had (though he would still be impressed), but other approaches we also expected to work would be possible with only what's in the story, and haven't yet been mentioned here.
EDIT: shared more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6369751
I think the key is knowing what high school she went to. From there, you could possibly get yearbook pictures and student lists. Knowing an approximate age would narrow the possibilities significantly as well.
I would probably take a social engineering approach to this problem- if you knew her high school and approximate age you could probably find someone who was in that class who would know her pretty easily. At that point it's just a matter of either tricking them into identifying the photo or just straight-up asking them.
There are no digital yearbooks from the high school. I checked
At this point he could not see my screen (he was standing directly in front of me), but offered me a simple bet – He said if I sent him the picture of the girl he could find out her name. Reminds me of: Sky Masterson: One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spade…
Of course one of the first things I did was ask another friend who I thought met her. But no, ultimately the answer did come from the internet, not from anyone I knew.
If they knew her high school and were doing lots of batch processing, I wonder if they found digital copies of the yearbook and tried facial recognition. For a single subject, it doesn't even need to be particularly accurate- they can easily sift through twenty possible matches with their own eyes.