What Are Content Credentials?
Published July 28, 2026
If you've seen a small "cr" pin icon on an image in Photoshop, Adobe Firefly, LinkedIn, or a growing list of other apps and platforms, you've encountered Content Credentials — Adobe's consumer-facing brand name for the underlying C2PA standard. The technology is the same either way; "Content Credentials" is just the name most people will actually see in a product UI, the way "Wi-Fi" is the name people use instead of "IEEE 802.11."
What the badge is telling you
Clicking a Content Credentials badge typically surfaces some subset of:
- What produced or edited the asset — a specific app, device, or AI tool
- When it was created or last modified, according to that claim
- Whether AI was involved, via a standardized "digital source type" field
- Edit history, if the tool chose to disclose intermediate steps
- Who signed the claim, and whether that signer is cryptographically verified
Our C2PA Checker reads the exact same underlying data and shows it in more technical detail — manifest labels, signer certificates, validation codes — for anyone who wants to look past the consumer-friendly badge.
What it is not
A Content Credentials badge is not a certification, a fact-check, or a guarantee of authenticity. It's a disclosure mechanism: it shows you what a piece of software chose to claim about a file, signed so the claim itself is tamper-evident. The claim can still be incomplete, or — from a dishonest signer — false. Adobe and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity are explicit that Content Credentials are meant to increase transparency, not serve as a truth verdict.
Why some files have it and most don't
Content Credentials only appear on files produced or edited by software that has specifically implemented the C2PA specification. As of now, that's a growing but still limited set of tools — several Adobe products, some camera manufacturers' newer firmware, and a handful of AI generators. The vast majority of images on the internet, including most photos taken on phones and most content from platforms that strip metadata on upload, will show no Content Credentials at all. That absence tells you nothing about whether the image is authentic or AI-generated — it usually just means the tool that made it doesn't support the standard, or the platform it passed through removed the data.
Checking a file yourself
Our C2PA Checker reads Content Credentials/C2PA data from an image or video entirely in your browser, using the official open-source c2pa-web SDK — nothing is uploaded. If you're trying to understand the difference between this and older camera/editor metadata like EXIF, see C2PA vs EXIF.