What is the standard tool the industry uses to analyze pictures like this? I see these are JPEG's, that can't be the best format for this type of data, is it?
JPEG is good for display. If you want to do any sort of analysis on the image, you'll want a lossless format that can handle multiple channels and the georeferencing metadata. TIFF is pretty good for that. There are a bunch depending on what sensor you're getting them from and what you plan on doing with them. And how sensitive you are to having a pallet of hard drives fed-exed to your office.
GDAL (https://gdal.org) is a wonderful tool that can handle essentially any geographic raster image imaginable. Tools like ArcGis or Grass can also deal pretty well with hyperspectral images. Lots of GIS shops also roll very customized image pipelines if they have particular needs.
I would have imagined they capture images with all kinds of visible/non-visibles light too - perhaps this is just the bucket that they dump the images from pr0/consumer devices into?
GDAL (https://gdal.org) is a wonderful tool that can handle essentially any geographic raster image imaginable. Tools like ArcGis or Grass can also deal pretty well with hyperspectral images. Lots of GIS shops also roll very customized image pipelines if they have particular needs.