One of my favorite things about visiting other photography websites is to find out as much information about the photograph as possible. Things like aperture setting, shutter speed and other information that most digital cameras make available. The information is embeded into a jpeg image thanks to the EXIF standard.

EXIF is a standard format for embedding information about an image into JPEG files. It was popularized by digital cameras, almost all of which store information about each photograph in the files.

EXIF includes Date, Camera Type, and exposure information including aperature, exposure time, and focal length. Eventually all digital cameras will probably have GPS receivers and store location data as well.

Some sites that I frequent don’t have this information available which I find disappointing since I think that is a way to learn more about the subject and the environment under the photo was taken. Now, all of the above would seem to be a little ironic specially since I don’t make this information available for my own photos.

Tonight, I went on a search for some information on how I can give more details about my photos. After some reading a couple of recomendations and writing a couple lines of code, I thought I had it wraped up. Nothing. A couple more sessions of reading and tweaking my code, I was ready to bet the farm I was done. Nothing!

At some point I decided to check one of my images for EXIF data by using a third party product. The image was missing all of the details that were supposed to be embeded onto it. I then realized that the Photoshop workflow that I use to create the photos ready for the site, strips all of the information from the image file. This is done in order to reduce the size of the output file and optomize the photo for the web.

Given the fact that I really don’t think too much of my photos I will continue to supress this information from my images. I imagine once I have higher quality images on my photo section, I will make sure I keep the EXIF data if nothing else for archival purpose.