Every time I upload and edit an image, I'm blown away by the ability to move the focus so the thing I want shows up in the preview image.
You drag that white circle around to move the focus. It's wonderful! Why don't we have that everywhere?
This is also the place to add alt text to your image (i.e., describe it so people using screen readers know what's there).
Not only is that the right and polite thing to do, but also some people won't share posts without alt text.
@grammargirl i am looking for a mastadon server that doesn't strip metadata in images (reinterpret anything other than size) and/or recognizes the OG tags coming from links. Alt-text can travel with images and thus be embedded and re-used
@zeroexp @grammargirl
Uploaded images are stripped of metadata in public sites for your own security.
I remember the case of the son of a drug lord in search and arrest who did a selfie with his father and put it on a social network. Police used the photo location metadata to find and arrest him.
Yes, that was a bad guy, but what about good people bein harassed?
Uploading files to public web sites which don't strip metadata can be a very effective way to doxing yourself.
@zeroexp @grammargirl
Beware: many people uses metadata fields for unintended uses, especially generic fields like Description.
But I agree with you, seems a waste not having the option to use that metadata.
I think the best approach would be when uploading, showing a form with all metadata fields, autofilled with the info in the file, so the user can see and edit it. That way security issues are avoided and you get a nice extra feature.
@jgg @grammargirl that is true....but in my opinion, there is much more utility in reusing embedded metadata than not. It takes some effort to want to load images with nefarious data. If someone is going to go to that trouble, they might as well be making deep fakes and circulating political memes. There is so much utility for genuine creators to insert high quality data...most importantly- alt-text data that can be read in and saved wherever the image travels. ImageSnippets has such a panel.
The problem I am talking about is not bad people uploading images, is good people uploading data that can harm them if bad people have access to it.
That's why I think showing the metadata to the user as editable fields can help to solve it. If the uploader edits the fields, the metadata in the file would be overwritten with those edits; otherwise, it would remain unchanged. This way there would be no issues; you could even show a little map showing the geolocation data, and keep it instead of stripping it.
I totally agree on the importance of metadata in general, not only for images. There are a lot of possibilities for that kind of data for searching and cataloging, statistics, data visualizations...
@jgg @grammargirl I missed seeing this. Yes, my software, https://ImageSnippets.com is exactly such a tool. You can edit all the metadata and delete location. But use the other information for a variety of good purposes.
@jgg @grammargirl this is an example of an image URL shared with metadata fields. Click on the image and flip it. In ImageSnippets, I have control over what metadata is saved in an image and wherever I share that URL, the metadata stays consistent
A nice way to display metadata, indeed.
@jgg @grammargirl
this is all true. Yet I think there is an entire group of creators who want to be able to share images with other embedded data, not just location. SM could strip location w/o removing descriptive and copyright data. UI's with a little more friction might encourage better quality sharing while retaining more of the original context and intention of the share. I use software I created to share images with links using linked data techniques such as: https://imgsnp.co/ptxi0