Metadata removed from photos for versions automatically created by Webflow for responsive

Design help General
1

Hello guys,

I’m working for a photographer client and I think I may have found a bug regarding images metadata (EXIF, IPTC, TIFF).
When I upload a photo into Webflow (with all the metadata) and publish my website, all the metadata are deleted when I download the photo. After a quick research on the forum I found no solutions for this problem.

But, after some experimentations, I’ve found that the metadata are deleted by Webflow when they automatically create versions of the photo for responsive. Indeed, if I unselect the responsive option for an image (or if the original photo is displayed rather than the one created by webflow) and download it, the metadata are there.

So… Is there a better way to keep the metadata in images than deactivate the responsive option for images ? Is this a known bug by Webflow ? If not how can I raise it ?

Thanks for your help !

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Hey Alexis,

This has been a longstanding problem with image assets in Webflow, but actually I think you discovered a workaround to this problem that I didn’t know about. When Responsive Images are on ( the setting is enabled, and hidden by default ) the EXIF is stripped on all of the published versions of the photo including the full site desktop version of the image.

In my earlier tests I was able to upload an EXIF-containing image and then immediately download it from assets, and see the EXIF data was missing.

But with the responsive image setting disable, I’m getting much leaner results that suggest that the EXIF may only be stripped by the responsive image generator.

There isn’t a fix for this, but for photographers, disabling responsive images might be the best approach. You’d need to see if it preserves copyright, etc, and there are a few scenarios ( like images in CMS-bound rich text content ) that I haven’t tested.

I’ve updated my notes and demo of the problem though. Was interesting to revisit this, and I’m seeing weird inconsistencies in some places.

Demonstration;

https://image-orientation-test.webflow.io/

There are at least a few wishlist items on this;

Also @webdev is a photographer who has shared some suggestions in the past about this. I think he uses a different hosting solution for his images.

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Hello @memetican,

First of all, thanks for your answer and sorry for the delay, I didn’t receive any notification about your message.

I think that at first I will disable the responsive option, as it’s the only viable solution for now.

Hope Webflow will correct this in a further update. I’ve created a ticket here.

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