Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Multimedia and Commons/Write geographical data into image files

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Write geographical data into image files

  • Problem: Images files can store location data as meta data inside the file. As of today image files do not provide this data. For a lot of files location data are available on commons. But they are stored separately on the description page.
  • Who would benefit: Users of Wikimedia Commons files who are interested in location data for images.
  • Proposed solution: Write location data from description page into meta data of the image file.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion[edit]

I am concerned that the geographical data is not always accurate. If geographical data is included in the file, future users of the file will think that the data in the file overrides any geographical data in the description. Downtowngal (talk) 00:12, 17 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Sebastian Wallroth: Could you describe more specifically what problem this is intended to solve? Why only include the geographical data? Why not include all the metadata? Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 22:22, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @Ryan Kaldari (WMF): I am in the one-wish-at-a-time mode. I want to have the ability to write all metadata into the file. License, author, location data, file source, tags. This would solve the problem that files found in the wild do not contain the information for people who wish to re-use the files. --Sebastian Wallroth (talk) 17:42, 21 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • There are several kinds of "location data". For photographs, there is the position (and orientation of) the camera and there is the position of (if relevant) the subject of the photo. Usually the location embedded in a photo is the former and if not present, it is often very hard for someone other than the photographer to determine accurately. I am concerned, for example, that someone sets the location description of a bunch of photos of the London Eye and this is embedded into the photos, when in fact the photos were all taken from different places, some looking at and some on the London Eye. Btw, if the JPG already contains GPS location when uploaded, the image description page is taken from that. There is other meta data that one could add from the file back to the image, not just GPS. However doing this increases the risk of damaging files when users make careless or disruptive edits to pages on Commons. So I don't think this is such a commonly needed feature that it is worth the risk that someone uses VFC to insert vandalism into JPGs or worse, to "out" a user's location into their JPGs. -- Colin (talk) 15:56, 29 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]