Did you know that each photo you take with your phone has a bunch of metadata added to it? The photo metadata is something called the Exchangeable image file format (Exif), “a standard that specifies formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras (including smartphones), scanners and other systems handling image and sound files recorded by digital cameras.”
Hello again! Are you still awake? Great!!
Metadata - that sounds a bit boring, doesn’t it? Only a librarian could possibly get excited about metadata! (This is a librarian in-joke that I can just about get away with as a sometime shambrarian) Metadata probably isn’t very important, and surely nobody could ever have been harmed by metadata? Like people seeking gender affirming care after becoming pregnant. Nope, probably nothing.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. Would you care for a jelly baby?
So let’s talk metadata. And Giant Jelly Babies. Wait, what the heck is this all about?
Imagine that once upon a time you had visited (let’s say) a top secret location where the Giant Jellybaby takeover of Planet Earth was being planned. Perhaps you are secretly in league with our new Jelly Overlords. Who can say? Still waters run deep, and all that…
While you were at the Jellyplex, you foolishly (and against all the rules) snapped some photos of these mysterious and elusive characters - like the one above. What would the metadata attached to one of your photos look like? Here’s a snippit, extracted using Phil Harvey’s fabulous exiftool utility:
1$ exiftool giant-jellybaby.jpg | head -16
2ExifTool Version Number : 12.76
3File Name : giant-jellybaby.jpg
4Directory : .
5File Size : 341 kB
6File Modification Date/Time : 2025:05:07 22:26:22+01:00
7File Access Date/Time : 2025:05:07 22:26:23+01:00
8File Inode Change Date/Time : 2025:05:07 22:26:22+01:00
9File Permissions : -rw-rw-r--
10File Type : JPEG
11File Type Extension : jpg
12MIME Type : image/jpeg
13JFIF Version : 1.01
14Exif Byte Order : Big-endian (Motorola, MM)
15Make : LGE
16Camera Model Name : Nexus 5
17Orientation : Horizontal (normal)
This is probably only interesting to massive nerds like me (massive nerd shout out for the legendary Nexus 5!), but maybe if we dig a bit deeper…
1$ exiftool giant-jellybaby.jpg | grep GPS
2GPS Version ID : 2.2.0.0
3GPS Latitude Ref : North
4GPS Longitude Ref : West
5GPS Altitude Ref : Above Sea Level
6GPS Time Stamp : 10:46:50
7GPS Img Direction Ref : Magnetic North
8GPS Img Direction : 34
9GPS Date Stamp : 2014:09:25
10GPS Altitude : 136 m Above Sea Level
11GPS Date/Time : 2014:09:25 10:46:50Z
12GPS Latitude : 51 deg 31' 45.59" N
13GPS Longitude : 0 deg 7' 33.47" W
14GPS Position : 51 deg 31' 45.59" N, 0 deg 7' 33.47" W
That looks bad. That’s the kind of thing that could get you into hot water with the Giant Jelly Babies. And let’s face it, none of us wants to go there.
Luckily you are (in my fevered imagination at least) actually an infosec maven and fully aware that you can also use exiftool to edit the metadata, including the GPS coordinates and other useful stuff like the orientation hint - of which more anon. You quickly run the following command to set the GPS coordinates to Null Island:
1$ exiftool -GPSLatitude=0 -GPSLatitudeRef=N -GPSLongitude=0 -GPSLongitudeRef=E giant-jellybaby.jpg
Null Island doesn’t actually exist - it’s just the place in the Atlantic Ocean where GPS Latitude and Longitude are both zero.
So in a very real sense your Giant Jelly Baby photo will now sleep with the digital (jelly) fishes.