Its not uncommon to download images from a website in general, however more specifically I know my mother - an avid photographer - uses a plugin to inspect metadata to find how and where a photo was taken.
That is not the typical use case. As web engineers one of our goals is to make websites faster. Speed is a very important UX.
Also unless you have a fast website, people will drop off your site and google won't rank you. No point of having great images with good EXIF data if people never see the image.
For photography websites, it does make sense to keep it but in general no point wasting those extra bytes which add upto GBs in wasted bandwidth.
I disagree that as web engineers, our goal is to make websites faster. Our goal is to make a website that suits the customer's needs.
Sometimes, that can even mean making a website slower. I've had that request before because end users were surprised that the site loaded so fast. We made stuff slow on purpose so that the user thinks we are crunching data hardcore and giving their request some real thought before presenting the results.
Sure, if the customer asks for ultimate speed and explicitly does not care about image metadata availability, then removing that metadata is fine. But otherwise, removing those few bytes probably won't change how fast your website loads by a significant amount. You're better off working on caching, reducing TTFB, automatically adapting image size to screen size, spriting icons with http1, server push with http2, gzipping, reducing the size of Javascript/CSS and working on perceived speed. This will probably be orders of magnitude more useful to users than removing image metadata. And it won't remove that useful information from images.
Wow! I primarily work on consumer facing web products where speed does play a big part but glad to know where you are coming from. I have not had such request or perspective. :) Thanks for sharing your experience.
Agree, that its not the first thing you should focus on. But saying you should not do it is what I was protesting.
When you run your site through speed analysis tools like the site posted or WebPageTest(my favourite), you do get a set of tasks based on priority and removing exif data is generally low and I am not advocating against that.
Recall that EXIF data is textual, and therefore no larger than kilobytes in contrast to the megabytes that JPEGs otherwise take up. While this may eventually add up to gigabytes of bandwidth, it will only be after downloading terabytes of JPEGs.
One can imagine a variety of small things that are only useful to a minority of visitors, and go unnoticed by the rest. "alt" attributes on images are one example, that are often used by the blind, but are mostly unused by anyone else. Do you think provisions for the blind should be removed, due to wasting (tiny amounts of) data?
The same applies whether it’s the server or user bandwidth, the volume used by EXIF data is going to be tiny compared to the relatively incompressible image data you’re shifting.
On a page with 100s of images removing the EXIF data from all the images would very likely have less of an impact than removing 1 image. Optimising is good, but you need to concentrate on optimising the right things. Start with the biggest impact and work downwards; chances are you'll never get to the point where stripping EXIF data makes a measurable difference.
Besides, if you're worried about every ms then you wouldn't implement a website that loads hundreds of images on to a single page in the first place.
100s of images are 99% lazy-loaded, so not a concern.
Get rid of the JS bloat instead, which doesn't effect the download speed at all, yet cripples the receiving box with the client-side rendering.
That is actually very uncommon for the typical user.
Outside of photographers, who is going to do this? What percent of the web are photographers (real photographers... not "here's what I ate for dinner" photographers)?
Even if you somehow got 1% of the total web population, wouldn't that still fall into uncommon?
Compound this with the vast majority of web images are not works of art where you have photographers trying to dissect how the image was shot and I would bet uncommon quickly goes to once in a blue moon.
If you run a photography site then obviously the metadata is important to you and they would consciously keep it.
