I have a PHP photo sharing application in which user-uploaded images are resized into various thumb formats using ImageMagick.
As a seemingly "smart" way to save on file size, I am stripping exif info from these thumbs as follow:
$imagick = new Imagick($image);
$imagick->stripImage();
$imagick->writeImage($image);
This works. It does remove the EXIF info, where a thumbs of 30KB saves 12KB and becomes 18KB. A significant saving when showing many of such thumbs on a single page.
The problem however is that it works a little too well. The resulting images seem to lose a lot of color information and look "flat" compared to their non-stripped versions.
Based on my research so far, my theory is that one or both of the following is true:
Regardless of the cause of the problem, I'm looking for a way to remove EXIF information in such a way that it does not affect the image quality or color itself.
Is this even possible?
Update:
Based on Gerald Schneider's answer, I tried enforcing the quality setting to 100% prior to "stripping" the image:
$imagick = new Imagick($image);
$imagick->setCompression(imagick::COMPRESSION_JPEG);
$imagick->setCompressionQuality(100);
$imagick->stripImage();
$imagick->writeImage($image);
Unfortunately, the problem remains. Below is example output where despite setting the quality to 100%, images are still flattened.
Consider keeping the ICC profile (which causes richer colors) while removing all other EXIF data:
In PHP + imagick:
$profiles = $img->getImageProfiles("icc", true);
$img->stripImage();
if(!empty($profiles))
$img->profileImage("icc", $profiles['icc']);
(Important note: using the ImageMagick 3.1.0 beta, the result I got from getImageProfiles()
was slightly different from the documentation. I'd advise playing around with the parameters until you get an associative array with the actual profile(s).)
For command line ImageMagick:
convert image.jpg profile.icm
convert image.jpg -strip -profile profile.icm output.jpg
Images will get recompressed of course if you use ImageMagick, but at least colors stay intact.
Hope this helps.