Image Toolbox
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An extremely powerful image editor for Android. And not just the usual features like crop, adjust contrast or brightness, maybe apply a filter, but you can do batch edits, format conversion, scaling the actual pixel image, editing metadataâŠall the things that mobile apps tend to hide behind the curtain (because why would someone need to even know the pixel depth, never mind change it? :eyeroll:). The downside is that itâs a bit awkward to use.
So far this is the only image editing app Iâve tried on Android that I can get to keep both location and timestamp EXIF data intact when editing. Sometimes. It seems to keep all EXIF data if you start with âsingle edit,â but drops at least location if you start with âcrop.â Within a single edit, you can make a lot of adjustments, including cropping, arbitrary rotation, saturation, etc. and itâll preserve the metadata.
Iâm still getting a sense of where things are and which controls will get me the effect I want, which is usually cropping and adjusting the contrast for iNaturalist. Thatâs why I really want to be able to make these edits without losing or altering the EXIF data: the location and timestamp matter for the observation.
Google Play vs. FOSS Variants
The version in the Play store uses Googleâs machine learning for some features, as well as Googleâs crash reports and other analytics. It can also be built as capital-F Free software, without the telemetry and Google-dependent features, making it suitable for F-Droidâs stricter requirements (though thereâs a bug keeping the latest release out of F-Droid).
On Preserving Metadata
Youâd think âdonât change the stuff that the user isnât changingâ would be a low bar, but most image editors Iâve used on Android handle EXIF data in one of three ways:
- Treat EXIF as junk and throw it away haphazardly, often including the time a photo was taken! (At least Fossify Gallery considers this a bug.)
- Remove some or all metadata, including location, for privacy reasons. (Scrambled EXIF is great, but it removes everything.)
- Preserve metadata, but with bugs. (For instance: Google Photos forgets the time zone if youâre 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 and Iâd have to use a desktop anyway to fix all the timestamps. And while Sly has an option to save metadata, it doesnât seem to work.)
I still havenât sorted out all the circumstances under which Image Toolbox keeps or discards it, but at least Iâve found something for the specific phone-to-iNat workflow.