Flickr's Metadata - yours/mine and theirs?

Flickr - one way is the highway?

Back in 2006 when Flickr's geotagging first was starting, I discovered that if you geotag your images using Flickr or actually other tags as well, on simple export none of this content that I added was passed back.  Essentially all "my" metadata was captured by Flickr?  FYI...

 Rev Dan Catt said...

[disclaimer: I work for Flickr :) ]

Just thought I'd add a note. If you're downloading the *original* photo from flickr, all it's original EXIF info should be there.

We have a policy of not touching your original photo in any way (it's your photo after all), the scaled versions do have EXIF stripped out, but that's more a function of the image scaler than anything.

Because we'll not modify the original and not remove anything from the it, the flip side also applies, we'll not add anything to your photo, so the tags don't get pushed into the EXIF.

This *may* possibly change in the future with YACBO (Yet Another Check Box Option), but the Do Not Alter The Users Original, is a pretty paramount rule.

Hope that makes some kind of sense.

From a geotagging point of view. If you have the location lat/long information in the EXIF when you upload it, then you can tell flickr to use that. Even if you move the photo on the map afterward, your original EXIF info is still there when you download the original.

If you use the organizer tool to drop photos on the map. Then the location isn't pushed into the EXIF, and won't be in the photo when you download it.

But you can use the API to grab your photos, grab the tags (and location) for them, and do what you want with them when you have them. We're starting to see 3rd party download tools appearing that do that for you.

There's really no intentional lock in going on.

Oh and glad to have found your blog too :)

Dan

11/27/2006 2:56 AM