Official Stuff
This cache is placed on city property with permission. It is available daylight hours only. It is NOT to be hunted at night. Please be very respectful of nearby muggles and possibly come back if others are present.
This Cache
This cache is NOT at the posted coordinates. Note that the 4.0 Difficulty rating is for the puzzle portion of this hide. The hide difficulty is a 1.5.
Our favorite Aunt is our Aunt Marguerite. Friendly, outgoing, and super-smart. She actually was a codebreaker in the military! She loves to travel and take pictures. But, as much as I love hearing about her travels, I have to admit, sometimes her pictures aren’t great. She takes a lot of pictures of water for some reason. She’ll show you a picture of some water and say, “This is Bermuda” or “This is France!”, but to us, they all just look like water. 🤷♂️
Aunt Marguerite went on yet another adventure recently. She would email us daily, but a few weeks ago, we stopped hearing from her. She went completely quiet. We tried to track her down, but we couldn’t do it. If we were ever to find her, we needed to learn more.
The one day, we saw a strange message. Well, “message” isn’t quite right. It was just a picture. To most, it would be “just a picture”, but after looking at thousands of Aunt Marguerite’s photos, we instantly recognized it as hers.
On one hand, we only saw this one picture. On the other hand, we just felt like there had to be more to this. We felt like Marguerite was trying to tell us something…
Here is the picture.
We have been unable to make any sense of this. For all the progress we’ve made, we might as well be looking at Blaise’s “Indecipherable cipher”. We have heard you have a real knack for solving mysteries with pictures. Can you help us find the message Aunt Marguerite is trying to send?
(Note: this is the end of the information for the actual puzzle. The rest of the page is refrerence. While not directly related to this puzzle, it does highlight several of the methods that will be required to solve tis puzzle...)
Using Pictures in Puzzles
There are tons of ways that people can use pictures in puzzles. Here are a few examples that were covered at the April 2022 Georgia Geocaching Puzzling Society Event!
Hiding things in the picture itself
Often, a CO will place coordinates or text in a photo. Be sure to search photos and look carefully! It is also often helpful to download a copy of the photo as you may get a higher resolution image better zooming options than you get in standad web view. It may be necessary to zoom in, change brightness, or make alterations to the picture to see the results!
Using the Picture Title
On a cache page, a CO can change the picture title (the information that displays over the image when you hover your mouse over it). It only takes a moment, so make sure to hover your mouse over a photo to see if there any clues there!
Using Picture Details
If you have a picture downloaded to your PC, you can right click on the picture and view more details/properties. Note that these properties get removed when a picture is uploaded to the Geocaching site, so be on the lookout for photos that are housed on other sites. Once you have the detail info, be sure to check it carefully for information that may help you solve a puzzle!
Hiding Info in the Picture File
A CO may use the picture info itself to hide information. This can be easy to check for. Download the photo and then open using either Notepad (Windows machines) or TextEdit (Apple machines). Note that you may need to change the file type the program searches for (Usually, you can change to "All Files"). When the picture opens, it will look very garbled and unreadable. However, there may be text that has been added! It is usually at the bottom of the file, so you may want to start there, but it can be anywhere in the file. Be sure to review carefully!
Steganography
Steganography is the art of making a message look like something else. It's been around for hundreds of years, but in the computer age has taken on new life! You will need a steganography decoder to view the information. Fortunately, there are plenty available online. Find one you like and check the photo for any hidden messages!
About the Georgia Geocaching Puzzling Society (GGPS)!
The Georgia Geocaching Puzzling Society was created in 2022 to support the Georgia puzzling community. The goals of the organization revolve around the three "E's":
- Educate: teach important skills and help geocachers find important resources to help them solve puzzles.
- Encourage: Encourage people to look at puzzles and develop a love of puzzling and hide more puzzle caches!
- Engage: We want to engage and create a community that supports creating and solving puzzles in Georgia!
We hold events each month in various locations. You can search for "GGPS" to see all of our scheduled events!