Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Multimedia and Commons/Easy edit tool for EXIF data

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Easy edit tool for EXIF data

  • Problem: If you want to edit EXIF data (eg. correcting the date, adding a EXIF information for description, author, licence, GPS etc.) you have to reupload the entire file.
  • Proposed solution: Some edit tool that allows you to edit the EXIF info directly via the webpage like a text editor. It would also be a good idea if the tool had some options like exiftool to correct your date in a very easy way.
  • Who would benefit: People who upload a file to Commons and want to edit the EXIF data
  • More comments: So that the EXIF data can not just not destroyed by some user, the edits can be limited to the uploader of a file or a specialised group of users.

    As far as I know, there is an option to add custom EXIF fields to an image. If there would be an easy solution to add and edit EXIF data this could add up to an option for adding a new field to include eg. Wikidata item(s)

  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: --D-Kuru (talk) 14:01, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • This is partly intentional. EXIF is considered to be 'non-editable' and original part of our files. Even if we save an upload and download, from a user perspective, there would still have to be an entire new copy of the file in the file history. Any corrections to this should generally be made to the file description page or the Structured data area. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:41, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • There should be at least possibility to delete/edit coordinates from exif. When somebody makes photo of something at home with mobile, but wants nobody to know his home coords. Or. I once made a photo of wayside shrine, but my phone had still my home coordinates and photo was placed on map 100 km away from real position - on my home. JAn Dudík (talk) 10:03, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Frankly, I think an option to strip geotagging should be part of the image upload flow along with a map showing where it thinks the image was taken. There have been too many times that I've uploaded an image with the embedded coordinates for my house, which meant I had to strip the EXIF, re-upload, and then contact an admin to revdel the earlier versions. -- Ahecht (TALK
    PAGE    ) 17:32, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    See also phab:T218057, phab:T222675, and phab:T22326. Jean-Fred (talk) 12:18, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks, D-Kuru! I was going to propose something similar, but missed the deadline. So I've had some prior thoughts about how this could work. (1) Allow to strip but not write certain fields (especially privacy-sensitive ones) and not others; (2) Allow strip &/or modify on upload only, but not afterward (as per Ahecht); (3) Allow modify at any time but only by the original uploader. Re. "I've uploaded an image with the embedded coordinates for my house, which meant I had to strip the EXIF, re-upload, and then contact an admin to revdel the earlier versions," I've been in exactly that situation before, and I'm sure many others have too. Good EXIF editing software is hard to find, especially on mobile devices. I suspect we have a lot of people revealing PII from mobile and not even knowing it. GPS co-ords, makernotes, author, copyright holder, and maybe camera serial number come to mind as being potentially sensitive. I might want to have my real-life name configured in my camera for day-to-day shots, but not accidentally doxx myself on-wiki. If author and copyright were writable, I could embed "© Pelagic on Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA" to encourage proper attribution by downloaders/re-users. A nice enhancement would be to pull the info into the image description & structured data before stripping it from the file, or a button to do so next to the delete button. Another nice-to-have: option to round the geo co-ords to the nearest a° b′ or a few decimal places, to allow approximate location without pinpointing a specific house. ⁓Pelagic (talk) 03:36, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Embedded metadata is often lost when editing a file. (Finding a good tool for) Copying it over from an older or different file can be difficult for many people. Therefore, when overwriting a file, an option to copy over metadata from the/an older version would be great. but this should maybe rather happen on upload when a file is about to be overwritten, combined with an appropriate check for removed metadata, and perhaps rather not as a separate editing option. Visualization of changes to metadata on upload would be useful.--Reseletti (talk) 16:37, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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