InVID & WeVerify Plugin: Verify Viral Videos Frame by Frame

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A viral video can travel around the world before anyone checks whether it is real. The InVID plugin is a free browser extension that lets you slow that process down and check a video frame by frame, using the same tools professional fact-checkers use. The InVID plugin is a free Chrome and Firefox extension that breaks a video into still frames, called keyframes, so you can reverse-search each frame, read its metadata and apply forensic filters to check where it came from and whether it has been altered. This guide shows you how to install it, use every tab that matters, and work through a real viral-video case from start to finish.

InVID began as an EU research project, and the tool is now maintained as “Fake news debunker by InVID, WeVerify & VeraAI”. According to the Chrome Web Store listing, the current version is 0.89.1, updated on 6 March 2026. The European Commission reported in 2020 that the plugin had already been downloaded more than 20,000 times from the Chrome Web Store alone, and it is used by newsrooms and fact-checking organisations around the world. It costs nothing, it runs in your browser, and it does not need an account for its core tools.

What Is the InVID Plugin?

The InVID plugin is a free browser extension built to verify videos and images found on social media. It was designed as a verification “Swiss army knife” for journalists, fact-checkers and human rights defenders, according to its Chrome Web Store description. Instead of asking you to trust a video because it looks convincing, it gives you a set of checks you can run yourself: break the video into keyframes, search those frames on several reverse image search engines, read the file’s metadata, and run forensic filters that highlight edits.

The important thing to understand is that the InVID plugin does not give you a verdict. It gives you evidence. A keyframe that first appeared online in 2023 cannot be footage of an event in 2025. A video whose metadata shows it was encoded years before the claimed date is not what the caption says it is. Your job is to collect those clues and weigh them together, exactly as a fact-checker would.

The plugin works as a set of tabs. Each tab does one job, and this guide covers the ones that matter most: Keyframes, Thumbnails, Metadata, Magnifier, Forensic and the Database of Known Fakes, plus the Analysis tab that gives you context on a video page. You do not need all of them for every check. For most viral videos, keyframes plus a reverse image search will settle the question in a few minutes.

How Do I Install the InVID & WeVerify Plugin?

Install the plugin only from the official store listing, never from a download link in a social media post or a third-party site. Follow these steps:

Open the Chrome Web Store listing for “Fake news debunker by InVID, WeVerify & VeraAI” and click “Add to Chrome”. Firefox users can install the same tool from the Firefox add-ons store, linked from the InVID project website.
Accept the permissions the extension asks for. It needs access to the pages you visit so it can read video links and images on them.
Pin the icon to your browser toolbar. The icon is a small green camera. If it is hidden in the extensions menu, click the puzzle-piece icon and pin it so it is always one click away.
Click the green camera icon once to open the plugin. You will see the tabbed interface: Analysis, Keyframes, Thumbnails, Twitter Search, Magnifier, Metadata and Forensic.
Before your first real check, open a video you already know is genuine and run through the Keyframes tab once, so you know what normal results look like.

There is no account to create for the core tools, and no payment step. Some newer features are marked as beta and ask you to register, including the synthetic image detector and the audio voice-cloning detector. You can ignore those for ordinary video checks. A few advanced features, such as the social network analysis module and the CheckGIF tool, are reserved for fact-checkers, journalists and researchers, according to the store listing, because they need heavy computing power.

How Do I Verify a Viral Video with the InVID Plugin?

Most viral-video checks follow the same six steps. Work through them in order, and stop as soon as you have a clear answer. You do not need to finish all six if step three already proves the video is old.

Save the video first. Copy the link to the post, and download the video file if the platform allows it. Viral posts are often deleted, and a saved copy means you can keep checking after the original disappears. Note the date, the account that posted it and the exact claim in the caption.
Open the Keyframes tab. Paste the video link, or upload the downloaded file, and click Submit. The plugin breaks the video into still images called keyframes. According to the plugin’s own description, it can fragment videos from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X (Twitter) and Dailymotion.
Pick the most distinctive frames. Do not search the first frame. Choose frames that contain a face, a sign, a landmark, distinctive clothing, a vehicle number plate or unusual background detail. A frame with a readable banner or a skyline is far more useful than a close-up of a face.
Reverse-search each chosen frame. Click a keyframe to run a reverse image search on Google, Bing, Yandex or TinEye. Look at the oldest results first. If the same frame appears in an article or post from months or years earlier, the video is not new.
Compare the context. Open the earliest match and compare the clothing, the location, the people and the event with the viral claim. If the original context is a different event in a different year, the video has been repurposed, which is the most common way old footage goes viral.
Check the metadata. Switch to the Metadata tab and read what the file still contains. Social platforms usually strip or rewrite metadata when they process a video, so missing metadata proves nothing, but metadata that survives can confirm a creation date or the software that made the file.

If the reverse search finds nothing, that does not prove the video is genuine. It may simply mean the video is new, or that the search engines have not indexed it yet. That is when the other tabs earn their place, as the next section explains.

What Else Can the InVID Plugin Do Beyond Keyframes?

The FactSpace guide that this article improves on covers keyframes only. That is a good start, but it leaves most of the plugin untouched. These are the other tabs worth knowing, and when to use each one.

The Analysis tab

The Analysis tab gives you contextual information about a video on YouTube, Facebook or X. It pulls together the video’s description, upload details and related material so you can see the context the platform itself holds, without opening a dozen tabs. Start here when you want a quick sense of a video before you extract frames.

The Thumbnails tab

The Thumbnails tab takes a YouTube video’s thumbnail and reverse-searches it on Google, Yandex, Bing and TinEye. This is useful when a video’s thumbnail is itself the suspicious part, for example when a dramatic still is used to sell a video that shows something entirely different. A thumbnail that first appeared years ago is a strong sign the video is recycled.

The Metadata tab

The Metadata tab reads EXIF data from images and MP4 metadata from videos. It can show creation dates, encoding software and camera or device details when they survive. Treat metadata as a clue, not a verdict: platforms strip most of it, and anyone can edit it. But when a file still carries a 2023 creation date while the caption claims 2026, that is evidence worth keeping.

The Magnifier

The Magnifier lets you enlarge a keyframe or image and apply simple filters to it. Use it when a detail is too small to read in the original frame, such as a date on a banner, a name on a uniform or text on a sign. Zooming in will not add detail that is not there, but it often makes a readable clue out of a blurry one.

The Forensic tab

The Forensic tab applies tampering-detection filters to a still image. These filters highlight areas where the image has been edited, for example where a region has been cloned, resized or recompressed differently from the rest. Forensic filters are the least certain tool in the plugin: they can suggest manipulation, but they cannot prove it on their own, and they work on still images, not on video directly. Use them on a keyframe after the reverse search, and treat a flagged area as a reason to look closer, not as a final answer.

The Database of Known Fakes

The Database of Known Fakes, known as DBKF, is a searchable collection of images and videos that fact-checkers have already debunked. Before you spend twenty minutes on a check, search the database. If the video is already there, the work is done. This is one of the biggest gaps in the FactSpace guide, which never mentions it.

Two newer beta tools are worth a mention even though most readers will not need them yet. A synthetic image detector from the vera.ai project and an audio voice-cloning detector are available to registered users. If you regularly check suspected AI-generated images or cloned voices, registering is worth it, but neither tool changes the basic keyframe workflow.

Worked Example: Checking the Viral Ofori-Atta Video Frame by Frame

This is a real case, documented by FactSpace West Africa and its GhanaFact team. It shows the whole workflow in action, and it is the case the FactSpace guide uses. Walking through it with the full plugin shows how much more you can learn than keyframes alone would tell you.

On 23 February 2025, a video went viral on TikTok and X claiming that Ghana’s former Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, had returned to Ghana after being declared a fugitive by the Office of the Special Prosecutor. Posts carried captions such as “Ken Ofori-Atta reportedly lands in Ghana”, implying he was back to face corruption investigations. The claim spread quickly, with thousands of views and reactions.

Here is how the check ran, step by step, using the InVID plugin:

Keyframes first. The fact-checkers opened the video in the InVID plugin’s Keyframes tab and extracted its frames. One keyframe clearly showed a roll-up banner with the year 2023 on it. That single frame was the first indication that the video was not recent, but the check did not stop there.
Reverse-search the banner frame. Searching that keyframe on the reverse image search engines traced the footage to an event held on 30 November 2023, the Ghana Capital Markets Conference, organised by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The same frame had appeared in coverage of that conference, more than a year before the viral claim.
Compare the visual clues. The clothing worn by Mr Ofori-Atta and by Dr Ogbarmey Tetteh in the viral video matched what they wore at the 2023 conference. Matching outfits across two videos is a strong, ordinary clue that the footage comes from the same event.
Check the other tabs. A metadata check on the downloaded file would have been the next step, although in this case the keyframe evidence was already decisive. The Thumbnails tab would also have been worth a try if the video had come from YouTube, and a search of the Database of Known Fakes could have shown whether the clip had been debunked before.
Confirm with outside evidence. The fact-checkers looked beyond the plugin as well. A letter read in Parliament stated that Mr Ofori-Atta was scheduled to return to Ghana between 14 and 30 May 2025, which contradicted the February claim that he had already landed.

The verdict was clear: the video was misleading. It was genuine footage of a real person at a real event, but from November 2023, not February 2025, and it had been repurposed to support a false claim. That pattern, old footage with a new caption, is the most common way videos mislead people, and it is exactly what the keyframe workflow is built to catch.

Notice what the plugin did and did not do. It did not say “this video is fake”. It produced frames, dates and matches that a human could weigh. The banner reading 2023, the November 2023 conference match and the matching clothing together made the case. Any one of those clues alone would have been weak. Together, they were decisive.

InVID vs Google Lens vs Fact Check Explorer: Which Tool for Which Job?

The InVID plugin is not the only free tool for checking a suspicious video, and it is not always the best one. Use this table to pick the right tool for the job in front of you.

Tool	Best for	What it cannot do
InVID plugin	Breaking a video into frames and searching them	Give a verdict; needs a browser
Google Lens	Quick reverse search of one image or frame	Extract frames from a video
Google About this image	Seeing a photo’s history and context	Work on video directly
Fact Check Explorer	Finding existing fact checks	Analyse a new video itself

In practice, the tools work best together. Extract keyframes with the InVID plugin, reverse-search the best frames with Google Lens or through our free reverse image search tool, and check whether the claim has already been fact-checked. If you want to see a photo’s history in Google’s own results, Google’s About this image is the tool for that job, and if you need to work out when a photo was taken, that guide walks through the date clues step by step.

For a broader look at how these methods fit into a full verification routine, our guide to reverse image search for journalists and fact-checkers covers the wider workflow. This article stays on the InVID plugin itself, as the tool deserves a guide of its own.

What Are the Limits of the InVID Plugin?

Honest limits matter, because a tool you over-trust is worse than a tool you do not use. These are the limits to keep in mind.

It is a browser tool. It runs in Chrome or Firefox on a computer. There is no mobile app, so checking a video on your phone means saving it and opening it on a desktop, or using the phone’s browser in desktop mode.
It gives evidence, not verdicts. No tab in the plugin will tell you a video is true or false. A clean forensic result does not prove a video is genuine, and a flagged filter does not prove it was edited.
Metadata is often gone. Social platforms strip or rewrite most metadata when they process uploads. A video downloaded from TikTok or X will usually carry little useful metadata, so do not treat an empty Metadata tab as suspicious.
Some features need registration or a professional role. The synthetic image detector, the voice-cloning detector and the archiving tools ask you to register, and some advanced features are reserved for fact-checkers, journalists and researchers.
Private and deleted videos cannot be checked. If a video is in a private group, behind a login, or already deleted, the plugin cannot reach it. Save the file while it is still public.
It cannot check what it cannot see. A video that is genuinely new, shot yesterday and uploaded today, will have no earlier matches anywhere. “No earlier version found” is not the same as “this video is real”.

The right habit is to treat the plugin as the first half of a check. The second half is outside evidence: official statements, news reports, and the original event the footage actually came from. The Ofori-Atta case shows why. The plugin found the 2023 banner and the conference match, but the parliamentary letter is what closed the case.

FAQs

Is the InVID plugin free?

Yes, the InVID plugin is completely free to install and use for its core tools, including keyframes, reverse image search, metadata and forensic filters. Some newer beta tools, such as the synthetic image detector, ask you to register, but there is no payment step anywhere in the plugin.

Does the InVID plugin work on TikTok videos?

Yes, with one extra step. The plugin fragments videos from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X and Dailymotion directly, but for TikTok you should download the video first and upload the file into the Keyframes tab. The FactSpace case above used exactly that route for a TikTok video.

Can the InVID plugin tell me if a video is fake?

No, and no honest tool can. The plugin gives you evidence, such as earlier appearances of a frame, metadata and forensic filter results, and you weigh that evidence to reach a conclusion. A frame that first appeared years earlier is strong evidence a video is repurposed, but the final judgement is always yours.

What is the difference between InVID and WeVerify?

InVID and WeVerify were two EU research projects whose tools were merged into one browser extension. The plugin is now listed as “Fake news debunker by InVID, WeVerify & VeraAI” on the Chrome Web Store, with newer tools added from the vera.ai project. For users, there is only one plugin to install.