Yes, indeed! I wasn't born with aphantasia -- I lost it overnight about 10 years ago, don't know why -- but I realized only recently that I do describe things to myself in my head to be able to recall them later, as a way of compensating for what I used to "see." "Karina is the one with black hair in braids, hippie clothes, sings well." "My running shoes are under the coffee table." "The pharmacy is not on Stadium Drive, it's on West Main." "At James's party most people congregated in the kitchen." I, too, have the black/mottled grey background, and sometimes I think there's maybe a dim, ghostly, distant image hovering in the back of the dark movie theater that used to house my mental images. 

Thats interesting; I have memories of events but I have no images - your description of metadata is a good one.  I discover different things every day. Yesterday a friend asked “if you can’t visualise things, how can you spell “ …. I couldn’t see the connection until he explained that he sees words in his head. What the hell?! 🤯 It never even occurred to me that people see words. My friend speaks many languages including Mandarin and said that the Chinese characters are pictures so he couldn’t understand how someone with Aphantasia could learn that ….. as I don’t read Chinese I’ll leave it to someone else to explain how aphantasiacs cope with more pictorial languages (indeed I’m hopeless with any languages apart from English, despite many many hours of effort - is that a common aphantasia characteristic or just my personal defect? ;0) ). I’m still trying to get my head around people seeing simple English words in their heads; I’m surprised non-aphantasiacs manage to get anything done with all this stuff going on up there. 😉