To save EXIF or not...which do you do?

[Marcel]

I'm reprocessing all my shots for the web.

Now, I've decided to have all my websized shots at 700px longest edge, and I've changed my border to a thin profile, instead of a keyline and thick profile.....This is to fit in with my website design change....(and besides, borders look poo on flickr, which is where my shots will also end up).

Anyway, I used to use the SFW option, to keep the filesize down, which as you all know strips EXIF.

I've been thinking, after browsing flickr and seeing EXIF retained in alot of them, that I'd like to retain the EXIF on mine.

Now, two questions...is it really worth it? (Keeping the EXIF), and 2 : Is there *any* way, I can get SFW to preserve EXIF.

I had a resizing, sharpening, bordering and saving for web actions, (with dialogs along the way), and the SFW was great....
If I change it to save as, with type jpeg, I dont have any control over the quality (if I want the folder its saved in etc to be automatic), which means that some shots come out nice and small, and others are horribly huge (with the same JPEG compression setting)...

Am I waffling now?
probably

 

[Marcel]

 

[Keltic Ice Man]

Just to show no one is ignoring you - I have often thought about that question - but as yet have not found a way around it.

Strikes me an action could be created telling it to be of a certain size, but keeping the exif. but not found one.

Sorry to be no help at all - but looking forward to an answer

 

[Keltic Ice Man]

I take it there isn't a "known" way of doing it

Allan

 

[Marcel]

I don't think there is....

Because "Save for web", by its very nature, is a process thats aim is to get the filesize as small as possible, it strips out the EXIF. It does seem silly that it's not actually an option, just like JPEG compression is etc...in the SFW dialog.

However, in answer to my own question, I've basically disabled the automatic "Save As" from the script and instead, it just pops up the dialog box, ready for me to choose the compression level. I simply try and keep it as close to 160k as possible....and the photos are turning out OK.

 

[Marcel]

Just an update on this

I eventually decided to keep the EXIF, and use the 'Save As' command, with a preset quality of 10, and to hell with the resultant filesize.
If any shots are too big to host somewhere in the future, then I can reprocess those individually and kill the EXIF.

I worked out that EXIF data is roughly 22k (when using Adobe's inbuilt estimator thing when saving). So when using save as, if you keep the estimated file size under 137k then you're going to keep it under 160k as a file.