What is the use of metadata of an image while rendering an image on a webpage?
Also unless you have a fast website, people will drop off your site and google won't rank you. No point of having great images with good EXIF data if people never see the image.
For photography websites, it does make sense to keep it but in general no point wasting those extra bytes which add upto GBs in wasted bandwidth.
Which is the case for listing pages of e-commerce sites, video sites, social networks etc.
As a frontend engineer, I find every way to achieve my goals as every ms matters :).
On a page with 100s of images removing the EXIF data from all the images would very likely have less of an impact than removing 1 image. Optimising is good, but you need to concentrate on optimising the right things. Start with the biggest impact and work downwards; chances are you'll never get to the point where stripping EXIF data makes a measurable difference.
Besides, if you're worried about every ms then you wouldn't implement a website that loads hundreds of images on to a single page in the first place.
Sometimes, that can even mean making a website slower. I've had that request before because end users were surprised that the site loaded so fast. We made stuff slow on purpose so that the user thinks we are crunching data hardcore and giving their request some real thought before presenting the results.
Sure, if the customer asks for ultimate speed and explicitly does not care about image metadata availability, then removing that metadata is fine. But otherwise, removing those few bytes probably won't change how fast your website loads by a significant amount. You're better off working on caching, reducing TTFB, automatically adapting image size to screen size, spriting icons with http1, server push with http2, gzipping, reducing the size of Javascript/CSS and working on perceived speed. This will probably be orders of magnitude more useful to users than removing image metadata. And it won't remove that useful information from images.
Agree, that its not the first thing you should focus on. But saying you should not do it is what I was protesting.
When you run your site through speed analysis tools like the site posted or WebPageTest(my favourite), you do get a set of tasks based on priority and removing exif data is generally low and I am not advocating against that.
We added a fancy "computing... thinking... validating..." interstitial, and suddenly everyone loved it.
It was literally just an animated gif with a meta refresh redirect.
The overwhelming majority of the time, to "make a website that suits the customer's needs" == make it faster
One can imagine a variety of small things that are only useful to a minority of visitors, and go unnoticed by the rest. "alt" attributes on images are one example, that are often used by the blind, but are mostly unused by anyone else. Do you think provisions for the blind should be removed, due to wasting (tiny amounts of) data?
The alt tags are VERY important for SEO purposes.
Outside of photographers, who is going to do this? What percent of the web are photographers (real photographers... not "here's what I ate for dinner" photographers)?
Even if you somehow got 1% of the total web population, wouldn't that still fall into uncommon?
Compound this with the vast majority of web images are not works of art where you have photographers trying to dissect how the image was shot and I would bet uncommon quickly goes to once in a blue moon.
If you run a photography site then obviously the metadata is important to you and they would consciously keep it.