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Comment by inian | Hacker News Reader

Yup this information is indeed useful for a lot of cases (for photo editing software, etc.)..But for images delivered on the web it makes sense to preprocess them to strip off the EXIF data since it is mostly not used by browsers.

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Exif data is particularly useful for preserving copyright metadata and (optionally) contact info for the photographer. Stripping too much metadata perpetuates the 'orphan works' problem and creates lots of photos floating around the internet that can never be used commercially, because the photographer cannot be identified.

More info here from the US Copyright office - choice quote: "For good faith users, orphan works are a frustration, a liability risk, and a major cause of gridlock in the digital marketplace." http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/

Also, the UK has effectively given everyone the green light to steal photos lacking metadata because it's basically too difficult to find the photographer. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22337406

And from my perspective, I release many images CCO Public Domain with my email or name in the metadata, and I'm annoyed that this metadata is not preserved because it means people may be reluctant to re-use my images due to (non-existent) copyright concerns.

Yup, I have covered this use case in the article

I think the article is lacking some nuance here. Just because the image is delivered via HTTP(S) doesn't mean that it's only intended use is viewing a browser. A lot of images are downloaded and used beyond that, and quite a few websites primarily serve images for use outside the browser.

Agreed, in those cases preserving the metadata might be the way to go depending on your use case. You just need to be aware of the trade off you are making..

The orientation value is used a fair amount by browsers and stripping it willy-nilly will likely result in some images being rotated in weird ways you're not expecting.

Support for this attribute is modern browsers is good but it is never used unless you visit the image directly via its URL or the like..It is going to be of no use when you embed the image in a webpage..Lot of times, I do a right-click -> open image in a new tab and see a differently oriented image and am actually confused by the behaviour..

Of course, if you are distributing the image URL directly, it is useful in that case..

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