Why does PaintNet remove EXIF data?

[nimimerkki]

Why does Paint.NET remove EXIF data from images? If I open a photograph in Paint.Net and save it, all Exif data is gone: date&time, camera details, etc...

[Rick Brewster]

It tries to preserve it. Not all file types support it though, and I beleive the version of Windows you're using affects this too.

[nitenurse79]

Always worth making a copy of your original image and adding as much of the exif data you can to your edit by Right Click > Properties on the new image. I always copy any photo I take before making edits. 

[david.atwell]

Technically speaking, once you've edited the photo, a lot of the EXIF becomes invalid anyway.

[nitenurse79]

I always think it is strange that with all the modern technology we have now, why do cameras save an image as a jpeg, when png is a far better format ?

[zeromus]

Personally, I have no use for anything but PNG, but there's a lot of reasons.. let me brainstorm some...

 

Even a maximum quality jpg is easily half the size of a png.

 

Image processing scientists are weird and probably like JPEG better due to it being some kind of a mathematical transformation of the image data instead of a lame compression of imagedata as if it were any other kind of data, which is mostly what PNG is.  And consumer electronics programmers are weird, having many clues and concerns about many things but not so many of either about how software users are going about their business.

 

I think JPG is designed to be rapidly compressed with low requirements on resources and power.  PNG is designed to be compressed without as much concern for those factors on a general purpose CPU.

 

Someone may have to correct me, but It's possible that JPEG can be implemented in a way which can put predictable bounds on compression time or image size.  This is friendly to a device which wants to ensure certain levels of responsiveness or cut as many corners on the hardware resources as possible

 

Cameras have a tendency to produce speckled images, which JPEG can kind of blur to oblivion, and PNG chokes on. To JPEG, noise is just easily discardable information. To PNG, it is the worst possible kind of information which has to be kept intact (random noise).

 

Finally, you get RAW instead if you dont like compression, so PNG is redundant, if you start from the point of view (its futile to resist) that JPEG is baseline functionality for image processing equipment.

[WXB]

It tries to preserve it. Not all file types support it though, and I beleive the version of Windows you're using affects this too.

 

Hi Rick,

 

I just saved a TIFF file as a JPEG with both MS Paint (Windows 8.1) and Paint.NET v4.0.5 with very different results in preserving EXIF data (see images below).  As you can see, MS Paint preserved almost all of the original EXIF data, the changes being copying the title value to the subject, updating the bit depth from 48 to 24 and deleting the color representation value.  Paint.NET made the same changes as Paint to the "Image" group, preserved only 2 properties from the "Camera" group and 1 from the "Advanced photo" group.  

 

Can Paint.NET be modified to provide the same functionality as MS Paint when saving EXIF data (sans the weird subject update)?

 

Thanks

 

P.S.  I just did a simple open file and save as JPEG without making any other changes to the image.

 

 

[Rick Brewster]

Okay,well, like I said ... it depends on what the Windows imaging component does. Paint.NET's code is set up to preserve the metadata. If GDI+/WIC don't pass it through then there's nothing else I can really do without writing a whole ton of code to manually handle importing/exporting the file format.

 

TIFF, in general, should be avoided. Paint.NET's support for this format is minimal.