Is there a way to learn where somebody's desktop background came from?

Factual Questions
1

There’s a student where I work who loves the background that somebody, anonymously, “Set as desktop background” on a public access computer and would like to know the name of the picture. It’s not one I’m familiar with (it’s a photograph of an old house by the water).

Is there a way to find out where the picture that’s being used as a desktop background on the computer came from?

Thanks

2

Not sure if the computer will have cached an intact copy of the original file somewhere, or whether it will have resized/rendered it to a different format. If the former, and if you can locate the cached file, there may be metadata in it regarding the camera it was taken on, maybe the owner of the camera, maybe (long shot) the geographical location (some cameras are GPS enabled and location tag photos)

3

You can try TinEye, which is sort of like the reverse version of Google Image search. If the picture was just snagged off some website, it might be able to find it. Link: http://www.tineye.com/

4

Google also has its own image look up, which I have had better results with than TinEye recently.

5

I’d probably take a picture of the picture on the screen and post it here.
Bet you get your answer quick.

6

There may be metadata stored in the image file. Do you have access to the file itself?

7

Firefox has a plugin that can search for images via the right click menu. It’s called Who Stole My Pictures Who stole my pictures? – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US). While the plugin might not be useful in this case, the list of search engines it uses might be: Yandex.ru,Tineye.com, Google.com,Baidu.com and Cydral.com.

8

What operating system is the PC in question using? In XP, you can right-click on the desktop, select “properties,” then click the tab for “background.” In the list of various image options, the current background picture will be the one at the bottom of the list. You can then at least search for that filename on the PC, and/or online.

9

Plus, now we all wan tot see it anyway!

10

I’ve had fairly good success using google’s “reverse” image search. Try it!