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I'm trying to tweet an image from an iOS5 app with code like this:

TWTweetComposeViewController *tweeter = [[TWTweetComposeViewController alloc] init];
[tweeter addImage:image];

I think my EXIF is being stripped out, but not sure if it is my fault, the iOS Twitter code or the Twitter service. I haven't found an authoritative answer yet, but How can I get geotagged pictures posted on twitter? seemed to point at Twitter and Twitter photo sharing goes live for all users had this in their news story:

Photographers will be interested to learn that all EXIF data, information that identifies what equipment was used to take a picture as well as the settings used, is stripped from the photos after uploading

I'm trying to find an official source or better authority that my code. I also tried to Tweet a picture from the Photos app, which also seems to have lost EXIF (location) data after upload.

Taptronic
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Kevin Hakanson
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  • I don't think you'll get an official source answer here, maybe on quora where I see some of the Twitter engineers hang out. It looks like your the resident authority on this actually. – Chamilyan Jan 08 '12 at 10:15

2 Answers2

16

From the Twitter Help Center:

What happens to the Exif data? I heard there are privacy concerns there.

We remove the Exif data on upload. It is not available to any consumers of your image.

Jeroen de Leeuw
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    I find it very concerning that the attribution data is also stripped. IANAL, but it seems to me that is a violation of copyright. In the very least that should be an account level preference defaulting to remove all. – Bruno Bronosky Dec 09 '13 at 16:02
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Just found Social Media sites: photo metadata test results which tested various sites, including Facebook, Twitter and Google+. An excerpt from their site says:

We have uploaded a test image with embedded metadata and have checked if any of the embedded values are displayed and if so, which ones. As a next step we have tried to save the picture from a Social Media web site or system on our computer and then we checked what metadata fields are still embedded.

The Twitter test results (as of March 2013) are:

No metadata shown, all embedded metadata stripped-off from image files.

Kevin Hakanson
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