Can you tell which software has edited a photo by checking its metadata?
Asked 5/14/2017
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If an image is edited in one program, the software name may appear in the file’s EXIF or other metadata. If the image is later opened and saved by another editor, that software may overwrite or replace the previous entry. Is there any reliable way to determine all of the editing programs that have been used on a photo?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
9y ago
2 Answers
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No. You're at the mercy of the editing programs. Unless every editing program preserves an audit trail of all existing metadata, and adds it's own metadata, then you're out of luck.
All that an editing program really needs is the image data itself. And the edited image data is all it really needs to save. Preserving any existing EXIF metadata is good practice, and a benefit to the user. But keeping an audit trail of all the other software it's been through isn't (as far as I know) part of the standard EXIF format, so that isn't kept - and it only takes one program that doesn't copy some of the metadata for that part to be lost.
Originally by user61668. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user61668
9y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Usually no. Metadata may show the last program that saved the file, but there is no reliable standard audit trail that records every editor an image has passed through.
Whether software information is preserved depends entirely on the programs involved. Some applications copy existing EXIF/XMP metadata, some overwrite parts of it, and some strip metadata altogether. Once one program fails to preserve earlier metadata, that history is lost.
EXIF is mainly intended for camera and image information, not for maintaining a complete edit history across different applications. So in practice, you may sometimes see clues about the most recent software used, but you generally cannot prove every program that edited the image just from the file itself.
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