Mobile Apps and Preserving Photo Metadata

You’d think that “don’t change the stuff that the user isn’t changing” would be a low bar, but most image editors I’ve used on Android handle EXIF data in one of three ways:

1. Ignore It

Some apps might preserve the metadata, or might not, or might keep some of it but not all, depending on what edits you make, resulting in it being discarded haphazardly. Often including the time the photo was taken!

2. Remove It All

A lot of the time you do want to strip out location when posting or otherwise sharing a photo, for privacy reasons. But not always.

Scrambled EXIF is great, but it removes everything, and when I upload a photo to iNaturalist, I want to keep at least the timestamp and (if it’s present) location.

3. Preserve It…With Bugs

Google Photos forgets the time zone if you’re not syncing with their cloud, so I ended up with photos stamped with the right location, but the time off by the difference from UTC. I had to use a desktop anyway to fix all the timestamps.

Sly has an option to save metadata, but it doesn’t seem to work.

Image Toolbox will keep the EXIF intact, but sometimes it’ll shrink the image even when you don’t want it to.

Why So Difficult?

Again, you’d think this would be simple. Just leave it alone!

And yet somehow it isn’t.

At this point, the only offline app in which I can reliably crop a photo without discarding more information than I want to is Fossify Gallery (since the bug’s been fixed), but its editor is very limited in what it can do. And the only offline app in which I can reliably rotate a photo or adjust its levels is Image Toolbox…as long as I don’t use it to crop the image.