Metadata can be a blessing and a curse at times, as Apple recently found with the release of their latest operating system El Capitan. The new operating system includes 51 desktop background images, but Apple forgot to scrub the EXIF metadata from one of the image files.
Analysis of the EXIF metadata reveals the following details of how the photograph was taken:
The metadata also shows editing notes from Adobe Photoshop 6, including comments such as 'Please remove some of the noise in the sky' and 'Overall, stars can be a touch sharper.'
The ramifications of Apple's mistake were relatively minor, but at KordaMentha we regularly see examples of the power of metadata that are far less trivial.
A common example is insurance fraud: someone claims insurance for stolen property and includes a photograph in their claim, but the metadata reveals the photograph was taken after the supposed theft took place!
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