system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: If a computer only takes an input of 0s and 1s how does it know to expect an image as supposed to text?

I get that any symbol is usually 8 characters in binary and that pixels colors in an image range from 0-255 with 255 being 11111111 using binary But how does it actually determine to either look for a letter or a colored image by just using strings of 1s and 0s if that makes sense.
gpt
It doesn't. You can interpret the same binary data multiple ways. It's up to the program that's running what it does with the data, which is why you can open binary files in Notepad. 

However, if the program is expecting data of a certain structure, it may fail if it sees data that doesn't fit that structure. A BMP file, for example, should begin with a header that specifies the width and height of the image and then the image data. If there isn't enough image data for the image size given in the header, a BMP loader will fail and report that the file isn't valid.

Many file types begin with a "magic number" that serves to identify the file format. An ELF executable file, for example, begins with the bytes 0x7F454c46.