saver doesn't preserve EXIF data

[taputechnic]

I've never raised an issue here, so please bear with me.

First of all, thanks for all of your work. I've been using your plugins for years.

I was holding off upgrading to GIMP3 until the updated saver plugin was working there. However, I noticed that the EXIF data are not preserved in the output. Perplexity says that jpeg-file-save/jpeg-file-export is not exposed to Python, but I don't know how to confirm this limitation.

My current workaround is to use exiftool to copy the EXIF data from the original image, but it sometimes rotates the saver-saved image, even if I didn't rotate it myself. This secondary issue might be fixable.

[akkana]

You're right: it's losing most of the EXIF.

Maybe there's some new API I need to call. I'll take a look.

I'm fairly sure there's a way to remove the EXIF rotation from an image using commandline tools (either jpegtran or exiftran, but I forget exactly how). But you shouldn't have to! Hopefully I'll be able to find a fix relatively quickly.

[akkana]

It turns out the GIMP 3 backend doesn't preserve EXIF either from Gimp.file_save or when calling the file-jpeg-export PDB call with default arguments. I consider that a bug on GIMP's part and have filed https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/14166 to track that. The GIMP team has been very busy for a few weeks with various things so I haven't gotten a solid answer about what to do about this bug, but I hope it will be fixed for 3.2 if not earlier.

In the meantime, in the special case of JPEG images, I've modified saver.py to call file-jpeg-export with include-exif set to True, so for JPEG images, exif should be saved.

This isn't a good or permanent fix, just a temporary workaround, because JPEG isn't the only format that has EXIF or other metadata. So this bug remains open, but for the JPEG case, I hope you will see full EXIF preserved now (add a note here if not).

[taputechnic]

To follow up, it looks like it's working. Thanks!

Sorry for the slow response. I hadn't gone through a batch of photos since I had posted previously.

Thanks again!