Seriously: given your story, if, say, they are colleagues, too, they may be in on it, and lie to you about the EXIF data (if they _are_ engineers, they certainly lied; how can there ever be 'nothing interesting' in EXIF data :-)?)
Most of the time, the simple answer is the likely one. My money is on the high school-yearbook line, but it might have been anything (did one of your colleagues go to the same school?).
If one strips all of the metadata a photo, or replaces it with metadata from another photo, or makes up some bogus metadata.
A photo without EXIF data? Someone must be trying to hide something from me. Let's see how good he is, and check whether there still are parts of the file with metadata in the disk's free blocks.
"or replaces it with metadata from another photo"
A Nikon F5 at f/5.6 and 1/100s? No way! If so, that car must have done a thousand kilometers an hour or so. Also, the aberration looks more like that of an Canon lens, but I'm not 100% sure of the model. I wonder whether it is possible to train a model on the 'JPG to camera model' problem.
"or makes up some bogus metadata."
Hm, I thought the Eiffel Tower clone in Japan was in Shanghai. The GPS coordinates seem to indicate that Tokio has one, too. Let's google to check that.
OK, that's more for the hacker engineer, but I thought one would not have to make that explicit on HN.
Umm, No, many popular photo-sharing sites at least give you the option to strip metadata from photos when posting. IIRC, fb does this as well, by default.
> and check whether there still are parts of the file with metadata in the disk's free blocks.
Good luck.
>A Nikon F5 at f/5.6 and 1/100s? No way!
It doesn't have to be believable metadata to be practically useless.
>Also, the aberration looks more like that of an Canon lens, but I'm not 100% sure of the model.
> I wonder whether it is possible to train a model on the 'JPG to camera model' problem.
Sure, but not for beer money. You could probably even have some success identifying individual cameras by characterizing their CCD/image sensor, and comparing to known photos.