## Image Ingest

Autopsy tries to automate as many things as possible for you. There are many tasks that will always be performed in a digital investigation and the ingest manager is responsible for making sure that they happen.

The ingest process begins after the basic file system information has been added to the database. The ingest process is similar to triage. A series of ingest modules (described in a following section) run automatically behind the scenes and make their results available as soon as possible.

You can start image ingest in two ways. When you add an image with the Add Image wizard, you will be shown the list of ingest modules and you can choose which you want to run and you can do some basic configuration of the modules. You can also launch the Ingest Manager run ingest by right clicking on an image in the explorer tree and choosing "Restart Image Ingest".

The results from the ingest module can typically be found in the Results area of the explorer tree. However, some modules may choose to write results to a local file or to some other location and not make them available in the UI.

## Ingest Modules

An ingest module is responsible for extracting data from and searching images. Different modules will do different things. Examples include:

- Calculate MD5 hash of each file
- Lookup MD5 hash in database
- Detect file type of each file
- Keyword search each file
- Extract web artifacts (downloads, history, etc.

Ingest modules can be created by third-party-developers and can be added independently of Autopsy.

## Configuring Ingest Modules

There are two places to configure ingest modules. When the Ingest Manager is launched so that you can choose which ingest modules to run, there maybe a small set of configuration changes that the module allows you to set from that interface. Additional configuration is typically available from a separate dialog box that can be opened from either the "Tools" menu or with the "Advanced" button in the Ingest Manager.

## Adding Ingest Modules

Not yet supported.