There is a growing interest in engagement with non-traditional data generated from a variety of sources, such as sensory devices, smartphones/watches, and social media tools. This paper reports on experiences of a group of pre-service mathematics teachers in acquiring and organizing imagebased data to analyze categorical data as part of a course assignment. To identify their actions to formulate statistical questions and to transform observations from butterflies' photos to cases when answering these questions, the video recordings of retrospective interview and artifacts generated during the data exploration were analyzed. The findings suggest that considering data/data handling became an important component of the statistical investigation before formulating statistical questions. While the use of hierarchical tables in structuring data by hand appeared to be intuitive, it could be challenging to use such a structure already built in a digital data organizing tool.