Social media’s war on image metadata

An interesting trial carried out by the Embedded Metadata Manifesto shows that most social media sites are pretty terrible at maintaining creator, copyright, credit or caption Exif and IPTC image metadata – despite the fact that posting and sharing is essentially what social media is founded on.

Facebook performs predictably badly, stripping all Exif and IPTC data from uploaded and downloaded images. This is doubly ridiculous because Facebook’s image processor already reads that same information and displays it as image captions and titles. Why not just leave it there?

Flickr fairs just as badly – outrageous considering it’s supposed photographer-friendly stance, but probably no surprise to long-time users who have watched dejectedly as Flickr’s star has faded over the years, with zero investment of either money or ideas since Yahoo bought it.

At least Tumblr and Pinterest leave metadata intact, but don’t show it, as with common Twitter image hosts Yfrog and Img.ly.

Google Plus is the surprise winner, respecting all uploaded metadata, showing it on the interface, and preserving it in downloaded images. Shame nobody uses it – not even Googlebosses.



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