When you take the picture, the picture is the data, the how, when and where of the action of taking the picture is the metadata. Same with other generated information.
Comment on Metadata and torrents. ELI5?
shadowSprite@lemmy.world 2 years agoOk, so I do know about all this, but I guess I never knew this was what it was called
richieadler@lemmy.myserv.one 2 years ago
MindlessZ@lemmy.world 2 years ago
An incredibly generic answer is that metadata is just “data about data”. In the given example, the photo was the data, so time taken, location, phone model, etc is all data about the picture, i.e. metadata. The same can be true of any kind of data. If you’re used to windows file extensions you could even think of those as metadata. “.txt” doesn’t change the contents of a file, but it does tell you that it’s text.