Any file that contains data but not instructions for your computer is not considered software?

Answer 1

All files are considered to contain software, whether they contain instructions or not. The only files that are not considered to contain software are empty files (files with zero bytes of data).

Notice that I wrote contain and not be. The files are not the software. Software is actually quite hard to describe because, unlike hardware which you can physically touch, software cannot be touched at all -- it is not physical in any sense of the word. Even the bits and bytes that constitute the software are not themselves software. If you think of early punch cards, the bits and bytes were physical entities that you could physically touch. They were hardware in every sense of the word! So what do we really mean by software?

The easiest way to describe software is by analogy. Consider a book that tells a story. The story is intangible; we cannot touch it. The story is therefore the software. The words that contain the story merely symbolise the story. The story is only revealed to us within our mind's eye when we physically process those symbols, by reading them. The story is the realisation of the words.

Software is exactly the same. The bits and bytes symbolise the software, but they are not the software themselves. Data files can be thought of as being pure data, with no instructions, while executable files are simply data files that also contain instructions. But both contain software which is only revealed to us by processing the bits and bytes within those files; thus the files contain the symbolic representation of the software.

So, to answer the question that was asked, literally: any file that contains data but not instructions for your computer is not considered software -- but they do contain software. As do those that also contain instructions.