To EXIF, or not to EXIF...

[mPower]

In preparation for our upcoming trip, I find myself looking at the EXIF data for all sorts of photographs, both on this site, and others that have nothing to do with Disney. As it stands, the majority of posters leave EXIF data intact. Yet there seems to be a growing trend of people who delete the data all together.

I'm curious to get fellow TMiP'ers opinions on the matter. Do you purposely do one, or the other? If so, why?

To EXIF, or not to EXIF?

 

[Roger]

I try to keep it in; I was not happy that my watermarking software was stripping it, so I found a better alternative. And so it's intact. My IPTC data is there as well. I don't see any reason to strip it.

 

[mSummers]

I keep mine in. Being able to see how other people got the shot is one of the great things about digital photography. Learning from each other makes us all better.

 

[Tim]

i use 'save for web' in photoshop a lot which significantly reduces the file size without a noticeable loss of quality. one of the tradeoffs is that it strips some of the data in order to give a smaller file size.

 

[Dan]

I stopped using save for web specifically because it strips EXIF data.

It's not even just about letting other people see the EXIF data, it's because I've sometimes gone back and looked at a small picture I'd edited down for posting on the forum and tried to find out when it was taken. With no EXIF data I have no way to know if I've changed the name of the picture when I saved it, I've had to go through all my Disney pictures to try to figure out what day a particular shot came from. Sometimes I want to know, if I'm looking for other examples from the same time or if I remember that I took another picture near the same time but don't remember quite what that time was.

 

[Jeff Fillmore]

I also stopped using the save for web utility on account of the EXIF stripping. One problem I have not found a simple way around however is Smugmugs greatest irritant IMHO- of stripping the EXIF data on resized posts. I keep it in tact but I also upload full size/quality files- so when I post an image it is smugmug's resized version and has no data.