A couple of notes on this: Photoshop doesn't strip EXIF because we didn't have requests to do this other than when saving for web to minimize space. People have expressed far more concern about preserving EXIF than stripping it. If we hear demand for stripping EXIF outside of save for web, we'll certainly consider adding that.
Photoshop doesn't edit EXIF data because it is not generally possible to do so without destroying it. There's no padding, so if you want to change a value so that it takes up more or less space than it previously did (like a title or the photographer's name or whatever), things that come after that value in the EXIF data get moved. But EXIF data can contain private camera manufacturer data anywhere -- data that Photoshop can't understand, and some of that data contains locations of other things within the block of EXIF. So if you change the length of text in a publicly documented field, you may corrupt other manufacturer-private data. There's no way to tell. The only safe things to do with EXIF are to keep all of it, delete all of it, or write just a few fields that we understand, and those are the options that Photoshop offers. So Photoshop is unlikely to ever offer general EXIF data editing. One of the other complications of metadata is that many files contain multiple kinds of metadata that represent the same or overlapping things -- EXIF, IPTC, XMP. There are standards groups that try to sort out whether the description field of one metadata standard should mean the same thing as the "caption" field of another. Photoshop has rules for what happens when there are multiple kinds of metadata and they don't agree (there are no standards here). Some of these kinds of metadata are not extensible (IPTC) or are fragile (EXIF). That's the reason Adobe's pushing XMP as the metadata standard -- it's: * editable * publicly documented, free * user extensible * supports manufacturer private data that leaves public data editable * can be extracted from files and even edited, even if you can't read the containing file format. That is, somebody can write a program that extracts and provides editing (with some restrictions) for the XMP metadata in Photoshop files, JPEGs, TIFFs, etc. even if you have no idea how to read Photoshop files or JPEGs. (It's usually much faster if you *do* know how to read the containing file, but it's important that you can get the metadata out of any file). So Photoshop always tries to write and prefer XMP, and that's what's used to hold the keywords you assign in the file browser or the data from extra, custom panels you add to the fileinfo dialog. Russell =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
