Query returns shorter varbinary string than the actual string

One of the tables stores long VARBINARY(MAX) strings to represent images.

I am trying to select images and convert them to back to images.

I noticed that the result shows a much shorter string:

$data = DB::select("
SELECT photo_string
FROM users_photos
WHERE user_id = 123
");

echo(strlen($data[0]->photo_string)); // shows 26633

But when I copy the string from the table and do strlen() on itm it’s 53268

The string looks like 0xFFD8FFE0......

Why?