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Kill the exif layer
Old 08-03-2007, 12:33 AM Kill the exif layer
ForrestCroce's Avatar
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Name: Forrest Croce
Location: Seattle, WA
If you put photos from a digital camera on your web site, you should consider removing the exif layer.

The camera records the shutter speed, "film" speed, and other useful data in there. Newer models tend to have orientation sensors, and record whether the photo is in landscape or portrait mode; sideways or normal. Lots of good stuff in there. But there's also a thumbnail image that can take up to 30 KB; when you review the picture on the back of the camera, it loads this one until you zoom in, to avoid reading the whole file and be faster.

Photoshop 6+ preserves the exif layer, depending on what you do with a photo. 7 and up keep the info pretty much no matter what you do, and starting with CS even files that started in raw mode will have the exif layer. So, if you want your images around 100 KB, you've got an extra 20 to 30 % file size that's not doing anything for you. And if you have galleries, or other reasons to use thumbnail images, you probably want those to be 10 to 15 KB, but you get a minimum of 20 extra KB. Most versions strip this out when you use the Save for Web command, but if you just Save or Save As, you can lighten your files a bit with no visible change.

So, in general, you should use Save for Web, or if not, download exifer, written by a German as "postcard-ware." I learned the hard way back when bandwidth used to actually cost something, but nowadays your visitors still enjoy faster load times, even on cable or T1 or DS3 connections.
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Old 08-03-2007, 02:37 AM Re: Kill the exif layer
Moxxnixx's Avatar
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Name: Lance
Location: Florida
Yes, deleting the EXIF data can save a lot of bandwidth, especially if you have a photo gallery on the web.

I'd like to point out another reason to dump the EXIF data...
Sometimes, that data can have info that might come back and bite you in the butt. A famous example of this occurring was when TechTV's Cat Schwartz posted some "cropped" photos of herself on her personal blog. The EXIF data contained full pics of her topless and was posted all over the web.

Last edited by Moxxnixx : 08-03-2007 at 02:56 AM.
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