Jura Trace

Jura Trace is developed by Jura Labs, a UK Community Interest Company and winner of the Security award at the OpenUK Awards 2026.

It is a free desktop application for checking images when the question is "is this real, edited, or AI-generated?". It runs entirely on your own device. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no account and no telemetry.

It is built for people who cannot send material to a third-party server: journalists protecting sources, human rights researchers handling sensitive footage, archivists, fact-checkers and digital forensics researchers.

How it works

Jura Trace reports two kinds of evidence, and keeps them separate.

1. Content Credentials (C2PA). Jura Trace reads and validates C2PA manifests in JPEG, PNG, TIFF and WebP files, including credentials from signers such as Adobe, BBC, Canon, Leica and Nikon. It is listed as a validator on the C2PA Conforming Products List (since 31 May 2026), and was the first UK validator on that list. It can also sign files with C2PA manifests.

2. Forensic signals. Twelve forensic checks look for signs of editing and AI generation. Methods include:

• Error Level Analysis (whole-image and segmented)
• Sensor noise analysis
• Copy-move (clone) detection
• JPEG ghost
• Colour temperature consistency
• AI-generation and deepfake detection
• Perceptual fingerprinting
• EXIF anomaly detection, including XMP AI-provenance fields

None of the checks is a language model. Each uses a defined method and a threshold you can inspect. The result is a trust score with the evidence behind it. Where the evidence is not strong enough, Jura Trace says Uncertain.

What it does not do

No single check is conclusive, and detection is not perfect. Forensic results are probabilistic signals that flag areas for a person to examine. They do not prove that an image is authentic or fake. Most images in circulation carry no C2PA credentials, and a missing credential is inconclusive on its own.

Please read the methodology before relying on, citing or writing about results.

Privacy and network modes

By default Jura Trace works fully offline. An optional Enhanced mode allows certificate revocation checks (OCSP/CRL) and fetching remote manifests. Because the source is open, anyone can check what the app does and when it makes a network connection.

Platforms and installation

Available for Windows, macOS and Linux. Download from juralabs.org/download. Releases are mirrored on GitHub. See the getting started guide for a walkthrough.

Licence

AGPL-3.0-or-later. Commercial licences are available from licensing@juralabs.org.

About Jura Labs

Jura Labs CIC builds open, local-first tools that help organisations stay in command of their data and of the decisions technology makes for them. Jura Trace is the first step towards wider content and decision provenance tools. It is maintained by Paul Griffiths. Claude (Anthropic) was used as a coding and documentation assistant. Architecture, forensic verdicts and security-sensitive code stay under human review and control.

Documentation

• Methodology
• Public wiki
• Getting started
• Source and releases
• Award announcement