Hi,

Does anyone know of and action or plugin for photoshop that will give the flexibility of the save for web option but retain the exif, without too much faffing around ?
I sometimes use imageready which can retain exif but i'd prefer to remain in photoshop rather than jumping between the two, but often i've 'saved for web' before i remember that it loses the exif. Hence half my photoblog images have no exif and all i've done is added my copyright. :( .

Any thoughts, or have I missed an obvious setting in photoshop.

cheers,

nacoya

Just adding to this as I go along FYI ,

I've just tried proJPEG 6.0 and Web Image Guru 5 and whilst both do reasonable jobs of compressing the jpeg for the web and allow various user defined settings they both still remove the exif data from my photos.

The search goes on ...............

Added : Just tried ulead smartsaver pro .. no joy. I still lose exif.

FYI:
* Save for Web automatically applys 72 ppi to saved images.
* It also strips off other metadata, e.g., info you may have saved under File > Info and ICC profiles (if present).

File > Save as... (jpg) -- with a low compression setting -- will preserve EXIF and squish down files considerably. If you precede this command with an Image Size command with resolution setting = 72 ppi, you'll get pretty close to SFW.

Thanks danny, never even thought about it changing the dpi.

I did a few tests however and there is no difference that i can see in file size (or quality on screen)between 180dpi (straight from my camera) and 72 dpi so i'll leave at 180. If i resize then save as at quality 8 or 9 in baseline 'optimized' mode depending on the composition it's pretty close to save for web at 80%.
At least now i know and can make an action to do this in batch if need be.

The reason i asked originally fyi is that i have started a photo-a-day photoblog and had planned to keep each image to 100k or less but true to form i'm breaking my own rules already :lol:, and just wondered if there was a better method than i was using to compress and keep the exif.

thanks for your help,

cheers,


nacoya

Glad you're over the hump on this one...

just an added related question here. i've seen a lot of 'exif' references of late. what exactly is this? what is 'exif'? i have a sort of sense of what it might be, but no clear definition i would care to repeat or use.

Craig

what exactly is 'exif'?

See this page (http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=EXIF&i=42848,00.asp) for images and a much better explanation than I could possibly come up with!

More info here, too:
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/exifinformation/index_r.htm

Relevance to this topic: Photoshop will preserve or strip off EXIF info depending on how you save a file. In some cases, e.g., Internet photo galleries, preserving EXIF is desirable. It makes it easy to communicate basic photo info to other viewers, e.g., shutter speed, aperature, focal length, ISO, etc. as this info is displayed along with the image. It also comes in handy in the future if you ever wonder, "How did I shoot that pic?"

The flip side is EXIF is "extra" info = bigger file sizes, which is not desirable in situations where one is trying to optimize (minimize) the size of web images.

thanks danny. i wish they'd do this with the history command in PS and PSP.

Craig

just for completeness craig here is a link to some useful freeware (which also has a firefox extension) to add a context menu exif reader.
As a photographer i use the exif info all the time but others may not and hence not find this useful. never the less here it is.

http://www.opanda.com/en/iexif/

cheers.