I do not use metadata, however, author Karl Voit (https://karl-voit.at/managing-digital-photographs/) spoke of them in his writings. He writes about Personal Information Management (PIM) aka Personal Knowledge Management (KPM).
I am curious about whether long-time users of EXIF metadata have had metadata loss when migrating between hardware, software, uploading to remote file hosting services, and downloading from them.
Yes, absolutely. This happens all the time. Anything that modifies the file has a good chance of stripping the metadata.
- Phil
Quote from: Unknow0059 on April 15, 2023, 07:57:08 AMI am curious about whether long-time users of EXIF metadata have had metadata loss when migrating between hardware, software, uploading to remote file hosting services, and downloading from them.
Going into further details, any time some new software changes a file, there is a chance of data loss, especially if it's badly written. A specific example would be the old Google Picasa software. On images from some cameras, most notably Nikon photos, Picasa would strip away the MakerNotes if allowed to edit the image.
I can't really think of a situation where migrating to new hardware would cause a change in just metadata. Corruption of the image would most likely occur as well. And this would be the result of a harddrive dying or a bad cable.
Now, "uploading to remote file hosting services, and downloading from them" can and probably will change some metadata. But it also highlights a big misunderstanding about metadata. All file system metadata will be lost. The most obvious data is the file system time stamps, the created and modified dates. Unfortunately, too many people think these are important and rely on them for sorting in a timeline when they should be sorting on the values embedded in the file, such as the "Date Taken" property under Windows. The loss of this data and a poorly worded message has led to many people believe that Google is stripping away the metadata when you use Google takeout. Only the file system data is lost, not the embedded data.
Additionally, any of the
xattr and
mditem data on a Mac or Alternate Data Streams (ADS) on Windows will be lost. These only exist on the local file system.
Some websites will always strip away metadata, the most obvious being social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. I also remember seeing that Microsoft OneDrive will edit the metadata of images, adding the
LastKeywordIPTC and
LastKeywordXMP tags. And personally, I would never trust Microsoft to properly edit the metadata in my files. I have not take the time to actually test this out, though, as it would require me to install OneDrive on my computer.