Image metadata getting removed
There has been a recent update to Discord which is stripping out all text metadata on images, this is wreaking havoc for entire Discord communities that rely on the image metadata being intact. This data is often read by software programs and used in various other ways.
Here are two examples of AI communities I belong to where this update has caused major issues:
- AI bot development communities: AI bots are often shared as images with the JSON metadata describing the behaviour of the bot being embedded as textual metadata within the image. There are thousands of AI bots that have been lost as a result of this change and people are forced to upload the bots to other services now. Meanwhile, people are scrambling to recover many of the bots that have been lost due to this change.
- Stable-diffusion communities: When an AI image is generated, the parameters that were used to generate the image is embedded as textual metadata so everyone can learn from everyone else. Again, this update is wreaking havoc as everyone relies on this metadata to be intact and goes against the open nature of stable-diffusion where everyone happily shared the generation metadata so people could learn and benefit from it. Due to this change, we've both lost all the knowledge that was stored within those images along with the open nature of sharing the image generation prompts.
Another community that would be heavily affected by this change would be the photography community that rely on metadata for things like knowing what cameras, lenses and settings were used to take a photo.
Proposed solutions:
- Have a toggle that has to be enabled per image upload to avoid having the metadata stripped.
- Have it be a configurable setting at the channel level, so if there is a specific channel where people upload images where the metadata needs to be intact, then it's possible. On those channels, display a warning when an image is uploaded, notifying the user that the image's metadata won't be removed.
- Similar to the option above, but at the server level (I probably wouldn't recommend this one, but it'd still be better than the situation we're in where all metadata has been lost for all images Discord-wide). I would suggest a similar warning to the channel option.
- Employ a more targeted metadata stripping solution. So instead of stripping everything, just remove sensitive data.
There are far better ways this could have been implemented that wouldn't have had large impacts across several Discord communities. Please consider some of my suggestions to improve this feature (I would personally suggest one of the first 2 proposed solutions).
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just embed the metadata in the alt text of the image instead
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I suggest sending images in zipped folders, the metadata won’t be stripped and compression will be avoided.
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I've seen several different work-arounds being employed, but these work-arounds don't really solve the larger problem this has created: ALL of the existing images have had their metadata stripped. All that information is gone. That's why I didn't even bother responding to Big P, because he clearly didn't understand the impact this change has had on some communities. It's not just a workflow change.
Work-arounds are an option going forward, but entire communities have lost significant amounts of information that was stored in the metadata of images. Overall I'm in favour of what the update is trying to accomplish, but a more elegant solution is needed, one that can hopefully restore all the lost information and minimise the impacts going forward.
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Raziel I highly agree, I had no idea this occurred and my empathy goes out to the communities affected. I wish Discord communicated major changes like this with their community.
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