What you’re looking at.
When you scan the badge on a Certified.Photos image, you land on a verification page like the one below. Here’s what every part of it means — point by point. Hover or tap a number to jump to its explanation.
An actual verification page — cert.photos/v/<id>. Yours will look the same.
-
1
Content Verification
Every page lives at cert.photos/v/<id> and is served by Certified.Photos itself — not the person who shared the image. The page is public: anyone with the link can re-check it, independently, at any time.
-
2
The photo — and its baked-in badge
This is the certified image. In the bottom-right corner a small badge — the certified coin plus a QR — is baked into the pixels.
That means even a screenshot or a re-share of just the photo still carries a visible link back to this verification page.
-
3
The verdict
The headline answer. A green Verified means the photo was signed at the moment of capture and its bytes still match that signature — it has not been altered since.
If the pixels had been edited or re-encoded after capture, this would turn red: Not verified.
-
4
Content Credentials (C2PA)
Whether this exact file still carries its embedded C2PA manifest — the open, industry-standard provenance record.
The preview shown on the page is a re-encoded display copy, so it reads “No Content Credentials.” The original file (downloadable from the panel at step 9) carries the manifest intact, and a verifier of the original shows “Verified Content Credentials.”
-
5
Verification Status — three layers
The independent checks that stand behind the verdict:
- Signed — cryptographically signed at the shutter by a C2PA-conformant camera app, before anything could touch the frame.
- Sealed — an invisible watermark embedded in the pixels. It survives screenshots, cropping, and re-encoding — and still links back here even when the C2PA manifest is stripped.
- Recorded — the image’s hash is anchored to an independent, witness-confirmed timestamp, proving when it existed in this exact form — independent of the device’s own clock.
A greyed-out layer simply isn’t included on this photo’s tier.
-
6
Capture details
The device and the moment of capture — make and model, the capture timestamp, and the app version — read from the signed metadata. These travel inside the signature, so they can’t be quietly changed after the fact.
-
7
The record
The Record ID is the verification identifier — the same
<id>in the page’s URL. When a witness-anchored timestamp exists, the Recorded time appears here too. This is the stable reference you can cite or re-look-up later. -
8
Scan to verify
The certified coin beside a QR code that points right back to this page — the same lockup baked onto the photo itself. Anyone can scan it to re-open the verification independently. Copy Link and Share do the same thing.
-
9
“What does this verification mean?”
Expands the full explanation: the security layers, how the proof was produced, what it does and doesn’t prove, and the trust chain — built on C2PA, with the signing certificate issued through DigiCert Content Trust Manager.
It also links the original, credentialed file so you can verify it yourself in any standard C2PA tool, e.g. contentcredentials.org/verify.
Verification proves this image came out of a trusted capture pipeline and has not been altered since — signed at the shutter, bytes intact, time witnessed. It does not claim to prove what the photo is of, who is in it, or that the scene is real. That distinction is the point.