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Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

Mildly annoying how almost everything strips out EXIF data nowadays, in part due to security concerns like this, and then I can't find out what camera, lens, and settings were used to take photos.

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My static site generator strips out exif data from images and I would expect all sensible sites would do the same. There is a lot of personal information jammed in there - if you post a picture of your dog making a funny face to social media you don’t want the exact GPS coordinates of your house plastered over the internet.

You have to be selective though, some of the EXIF data specifies things like color spaces and orientation that is used by browsers for displaying the image properly.

For my personal website I have a lot of photography-oriented blog posts [1], but I have special code to strip out GPS info from the location if it's close to my home [2].

EDIT: my vibe-coding slop agent put my home GPS lat long in the example config in the README lol. Please don't rob my house; I'll go run git-filter-repo later.

[1] https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2023-12-20-trip-to-europe/

[2] https://github.com/dllu/pupphoto/blob/main/gps.py#L81

Does this inadvertently reveal the location of your home? It's like a cloud of photos except in this one circle.

Yeah, if I take a dense grid of photos near my house, it would reveal a 500 m circle. But in practice I don't take _that_ many photos in the neighborhood. Also, the circle isn't perfectly centered on my home.

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