Google’s head of search spam posted a video today reconfirming that while Google may not be using EXIF, exchangeable image file format, data for ranking images today, they do reserve the right to use the data in the future within their ranking algorithm.
Google does recommend you use the EXIF data, if it is readily available but if it is hard to get to the data, then don’t bother.
EXIF data includes data such as the date and time the photo was taken, the location of the photo, which camera it was taken on, as well as a lot of other technical details about the photo.
Here is the video:
