White Sands Dune Ripples

Woah, Facebook Strips Your EXIF data!

Richard Charpentier Notes from Rich, Photography, Tech Tips 8 Comments

Well, over the past few months I’ve enjoyed sharing images via Facebook with friends. It’s been super convenient, but I now think I’ll look for other ways to share images. Probably the best way? This blog.

Why am I reconsidering using Facebook to share images?  Well, they strip your EXIF data out.  All of it.

Several favorite blog sites have discussed watermarking and EXIF data recently, and I decided to recheck my images this morning.  See, the metadata that I include in my photos is vast.  Copyright, keywords, creator, contact information……It’s all in there.  Last year a magazine wanted to use one of my images, and they had a hard time tracking me down because I didn’t include enough information in my EXIF data.  So, I made some changes and added a ton of information.

Every photo I export has that information, and a watermark.  I’m thinking about doing away with the watermark, it’s annoying.  And the EXIF data tells you all you need to know.

Well, all that you need to know if you haven’t loaded it to Facebook.  Facebook takes out all of your copyright data, EXIF data, everything…….Woah, that’s not good at all gang!

How do I know this?  Well, I downloaded a few of my images from my Facbook Photos section.  And here’s what I found in my file information…….

Wow, nothing in there at all.  Not even my camera data, so you don’t even know what I shot with.

Now, I downloaded a few photos from this blog just to double check.  And the EXIF data is present from my site.  Want to see the difference?

So, here ya go.  Going forward I’ll be posting images here, and sharing the posts through Facebook.  I mean really, I like to share images with friends, but I really don’t want to open myself up for loss of my work and copyright.  That’s not okay.  And why Facebook does it is beyond me.  This fact alone has made Facebook much less interesting to me, and I know my personal usage will be curtailed.

Comments 8

  1. Rich,

    The photos sent to Facebook are shrunk so much that the images aren’t worth copying for profit, don’t you think? Or, are those sizes and jpeg quality enough for some bad guys?

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    Mike,

    You’re right, you can shrink images beforehand and make it an unprintable image. But the fact that you’re copyright info, contact info, etc is stripped is concerning.

  3. Rich, I believe that Facebook does the shrinking and format conversion at their end via the uploader or otherwise. I’ve uploaded photos by three different methods and all are the same small size regardless of the original format. I understand your concern about copyright. If someone is looking at your photo or downloading it, presumably that person could also go to your profile or click on your links to get contact info.

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  5. Hey Rich,

    As I understand it, they do that to help make the file size smaller, thus making more space on their servers. Why they do that? I’m not completely sure, since the embedded data doesn’t make the file that much bigger….

    That’s why I don’t upload photos to FB. I’ve already had a couple of people steal some of my photos and try to claim them as their own.

    Mike, if you have the know-how, you can take a small photo like that and increase the quality enough for a decent size pic. Not something that will be good enough for posters, but at least 8×10’s at an ok-quality. Unfortunately, there are too many people out there that can do that….

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