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Photo redundancy? A survey.


Bon Echo

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Just curious about photo redundancy on Waymarking.com - I suspect there is a lot of redundant storage of photo on the Waymarking servers, but now I;m curious enough to try to get somewhat of a picture of what that looks like in terms of actual storage space.

For example: if I visit a location, maybe I take 4 photos. Then I waymark that location in 3 categories, and upload the same 4 photos 3 times, once for each waymark. If those photos are 3 MB each, I just added 36MB of photo data when I really only needed to add 12MB (if those photo could be used for multiple waymarks without having to be uploaded each time)

My thought here is this - being able to reuse an uploaded photo could save up time and save GC a lot of storage space. But how much are we talking about?

 

 

To that end, please let me know approximately the following:

1) Typical size of photo in MB per POSTED and per VISITED (if they differ, or just say "same") (guesstimate)

2) Typical number of photos per waymark you POST (guesstimate)

3) Typical number of waymarks you create with a same set of photos (explained below in a bit more detail) (guesstimate)

4) Typical number of photos per waymark you VISIT

5) Approximate number of waymarks you have POSTED and VISITED

 

My answers (with some detail to help clarify but all I;m really looking for are the numbers):

1) 1MB (My average photo upload is probably 1MB - earlier they were smaller (~500-800kb) and then for a while they were more around 3MB, but majority are ~1MB) - same for both POSTS and VISITS

2) 3

3) 2 (I don't tend to "maximize" the number of waymarks I can post for a particular subject, and the average may be closer to 1 than it is to 2; some Waymarks are very good and posting a subject to many different categories and so they will probably use the same photos for 3-7 different.

4) 1 - very definitely an average of 1 for my visits and that's probably the case for most of us

5) Posted ~500 and visited ~1000

 

Thanks for participating in my little "research project"

 

My a-priori guesstimates:

I assume that the average photo uploaded to Waymarking is 2MB, . I assume that each waymark is created with an average of 2.5 photos, and that each visit log is accompanied by 1 photo. I assume that each waymark is visited on average 0.4 times (many are never visited, and a few have many visits)

There are 839455 waymarks, so:

839455 waymarks X 2.5 photos per waymark POSTED X 2MB = 4.2 TB

and

839455 waymarks X 0.4 visited per wayamrk X 1 photos per waymark VISITED X 2MB = 0.3 TB

meaning there is 4.5 TB of photo storage (multiplied by some factor for redundancy, 2x or 3x, or, well, I really don't know) for the Waymarking website

 

[suddenly the amount of storage space does not seem so huge, but lets wait and see]

 

Does anyone have an idea of what hosting fees would be on the Amazon network for that level of data? Just curious.

 

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16 hours ago, Bon Echo said:

To that end, please let me know approximately the following:

1) Typical size of photo in MB per POSTED and per VISITED (if they differ, or just say "same") (guesstimate)

2) Typical number of photos per waymark you POST (guesstimate)

3) Typical number of waymarks you create with a same set of photos (explained below in a bit more detail) (guesstimate)

4) Typical number of photos per waymark you VISIT

5) Approximate number of waymarks you have POSTED and VISITED

 

1) I  do edit all of my pictures before uploading. First I rotate them a bit, most pictures have a small inclination of three to six degrees, hardly to see, but especially buildings look so much better when they are really upright. Then I crop them to have the object fill the whole picture without any irrelevant objects around. And finally I resize them so that the larger side has 1280 pixels, that is still larger than what you see on the picture detail page. This is done in less than five seconds per picture (in IrfanView: ctrl+U, type number, enter, draw rectangle, ctrl+Y, ctrl+R, type number, enter). I had never checked it before, and I was surprised, the result has only an average size of about 250 kb. (I do the same for visit pictures.)

2) The average of my last 50 waymarks was 4.4 pictures per waymark. Feels like a sensible guess also for the rest. I hardly ever upload less than three, rarely more than ten, but it can happen.

3) About 1.3 waymarks per location (also calculated from my  50 most recent ones). The average might be somewhat higher, but not very much.

4) Usually not more than two pictures per visit. Pure guess: about 1.5 in average.

5) Posted about 6200 (some denied or still waiting for approval, but they use storage space, too), visited 860.

Edited by fi67
typos
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16 hours ago, fi67 said:

1) Typical size of photo in MB per POSTED and per VISITED (if they differ, or just say "same") (guesstimate)

2) Typical number of photos per waymark you POST (guesstimate)

3) Typical number of waymarks you create with a same set of photos (explained below in a bit more detail) (guesstimate)

4) Typical number of photos per waymark you VISIT

5) Approximate number of waymarks you have POSTED and VISITED

 

1) - Around 750 kb - almost all of our pix are 1920 or 2272 in the long dimension, compression level 90. Any cropped will be smaller.

2) - I'll guess 5. We cross post a lot, but if there are more than 1 or 2 cross posts for a subject we will put as few as 4 and as many as 12 pix on the page, copying them from the original post. Even if there is only 1 cross post we will often put the majority of the pix on the page.

3) - This is hard to estimate. I'll say about 4. They run the gamut from 1 to over 40. In general though, the larger the number, the fewer pix per post are uploaded.

4) - 1

5) - 23,502 posted - 471 visited.

These numbers give us about 88 Gb for posts and .75 Gb for visits - this could result in as many as 100,000 pix uploaded. And I wonder why I have carpal tunnel syndrome.

Remember when a floppy could contain 880 Kb and hard drives were 20 Mb?

Remember this quote from Bill Gates? - "512 K is all the memory anyone will ever need".

Remember when we were using 8 bit processors running at 1.5 Mhz?

Keith

Edited by BK-Hunters
Edited for clarification
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I did some research on the visits that were logged for waymarks I posted. About one of 6.6 waymarks was visited, making a ratio of 0.15 per waymark. 0.06 of them were visited more than once (up to 27 times as the current record). The result is a ratio of 0.32 visits per waymark over all, So I guess your estimate of 0.4 makes sense, because my home zone is not very saturated neither with local nor traveling waymarkers, the global average is probably higher than mine. They uploaded between 0 and 10(!) pictures, resulting in an average of about 1.1 pictures per visit. I have no idea of the pictures sizes, though.

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If I'm not mistaken, every photo is reduced to a maximum length of 2048 pixels at Groundspeak. They also change the compression rate. Therefore, the size of the uploaded photo on your side and the size of the photo stored at Groundspeak can differ a lot. To check my statement I downloaded a photo of one of my first waymarks. It has 2448 x 3264 pixels and 1.76 MB. Then I uploaded the same photo to the same waymark and downloaded it again. And this one had 1536 x 2048 pixels and 526 KB.

I edit almost every photo, then resize it to a maximum length of 2048 pixels and save that to a temporary folder for uploads, so that the upload is faster and I still keep my photos in the original size.

 

Here are my answers:

 

1. Around 1 MB

2. Estimated average is 3

3. Difficult to estimate. I guess somewhere around 2, probably less than that.

4. Minimum is 1, in rare situations 2 or more

5. Created: 1163 (including the unfinished, pending and denied ones, because they also need storage ;)); Visited: 1817

 

 

On ‎10‎/‎28‎/‎2018 at 12:35 AM, BK-Hunters said:

Remember when a floppy could contain 880 Kb and hard drives were 20 Mb?

Remember this quote from Bill Gates? - "512 K is all the memory anyone will ever need".

Remember when we were using 8 bit processors running at 1.5 Mhz?

 

I remember that people were laughing at me, because my first PC had 1 MB Memory and a 40 MB hard drive. Everybody kept asking me "How will you ever fill 40(!) MB???" And talking about floppy: I remember the time when I only had a datasette for my Atari 800XL and received a floppy drive for christmas. And I remember that we used a small tool to convert one-sided 5.25" floppys to double-sided ones. Oh man, I'm ooooooold.

Edited by PISA-caching
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On ‎10‎/‎26‎/‎2018 at 10:34 PM, Bon Echo said:

I assume that each waymark is visited on average 0.4 times (many are never visited, and a few have many visits)

 

You might think that I'm weird, but I keep all those "..... has been visited" mails in a separate folder. I knew that I would need them one day. :-) Right now there are around 600 of them and I have 1142 approved waymarks. So, my ratio is about 0.525, but 0.4 will be a good average number.

 

On ‎10‎/‎26‎/‎2018 at 10:34 PM, Bon Echo said:

839455 waymarks X 2.5 photos per waymark POSTED X 2MB = 4.2 TB

and

839455 waymarks X 0.4 visited per wayamrk X 1 photos per waymark VISITED X 2MB = 0.3 TB

 

I think the "2MB" in your calculation is not correct. Download some of your later uploads (visits or postings) and you will see that most of them are much smaller than that. Depending on how complex the photo is, I found that my own photos vary from around 250k to 1.1 MB, although they all have a long side of 2048 pixels.

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32 minutes ago, PISA-caching said:

 

You might think that I'm weird, but I keep all those "..... has been visited" mails in a separate folder. I knew that I would need them one day. :-) Right now there are around 600 of them and I have 1142 approved waymarks. So, my ratio is about 0.525, but 0.4 will be a good average number.

 

 

I did that for one year.  The numbers were interesting.

  • Surprised 1
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1) Typical size of photo in MB per POSTED and per VISITED (if they differ, or just say "same") (guesstimate)

450 Mb.  I use Irfanview to shrink the short side of the photo to 600 dots.  I used to do that mainly because of very slow upload speeds.  (Download was 1.5 Mbits/sec, but upload was only slightly faster than old dial-up!).  Since I batch process, I still do this even though upload speeds are very fast.  Exception: I don't shrink photos that need high resolution to read wording - signs, maps, etc.

2) Typical number of photos per waymark you POST (guesstimate)

3.5 (3 to 4)

3) Typical number of waymarks you create with a same set of photos (explained below in a bit more detail) (guesstimate)

Differs too widely to make any kind of estimate.

4) Typical number of photos per waymark you VISIT

2

5) Approximate number of waymarks you have POSTED and VISITED

Posted 1677; Visited 2695

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I used my ten most recent posts and ten most recent visits for data.

 

1) Typical size of photo in MB per POSTED and per VISITED (if they differ, or just say "same") (guesstimate)

Post photos average 0.7MB.  Visits average 0.5MB.

 

2) Typical number of photos per waymark you POST (guesstimate)

Waymarks average 3.2 photos per post.

 

3) Typical number of waymarks you create with a same set of photos (explained below in a bit more detail) (guesstimate)

Each post photo was used in 1.2 waymarks.

 

4) Typical number of photos per waymark you VISIT

1

 

5) Approximate number of waymarks you have POSTED and VISITED

1654 posted, 4712 visited

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I am guilty of taking up more than my share of storage on the servers. My waymark was DECLINED because I had one duplicate photo. It met all category requirements. Why the heck not just approve the waymark and mention there's a duplicate photo? Because it takes up too much storage space, I guess! 

 

Good forum question, by the way. I often use the same photo for many visits and postings depending on the categories.  I would love to be able to use same photos without uploading again! 

 

One thing I've noticed on scavenger hunts  is that if I have previously visited a hunt waymark and visit it again later ( doesn't happen often), the system automatically attaches the previous visit's photo. 

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When I first started Waymarking in 2006, I was using a 56k modem on a landline. All photos were trimmed and then reduced to ~600 x 800 pixels before I sent them. Now, because I'm on a metered internet system, I still have a habit of reducing my photos to about 1000 x 1200 pixels.

I don't think we need to worry about running out of memory. Memory space is probably their lowest cost item now. My newest external hard drive ( 2-years old) is 1TB, and it cost less, and is slightly smaller than my 1GB external hard drive that's a few years older. I've even got a couple 16GB flash drives now that cost me less than $6 each.

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15 hours ago, Max and 99 said:

... Why the heck not just approve the waymark and mention there's a duplicate photo? ...

 

I once approved a waymark that had a typo in the title and some other  minor problems. I told the owner via the acceptance mail to change this and that. A few days later nothing had happened. I sent a personal note to the account (in vain) and in the end I changed the typo and everything else on my own. That has happened to me at least twice. Since then I think twice before I approve a waymark that is not as good as it should be. Don't get me wrong, I don't blame the WM owner, because maybe he/she creates too many waymarks to read all the acceptance mails and maybe she/he is too busy to read personal mails also. But by denying a waymark I get the owners attention for sure, the error can easyly be repaired and resubmitting is just a click with the mouse. So, don't take it personally.

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15 hours ago, Max and 99 said:

Good forum question, by the way. I often use the same photo for many visits and postings depending on the categories.  I would love to be able to use same photos without uploading again!

 

Thanks everyone for the comments so far. My intention is not to be critical or anyone using 'too much" server space -  I have no idea how much space the Waymarking photos use (although aside from the photos I'm guessing that text for 800,000 waymarks uses peanuts in terms of storage space - my guess is under 20 GBs) and as far as I know there's never been any hint of an issue/concern in that regards from Groundspeak. But my thought was that it would be so much better if we could upload a given photo once, then link it to multiple waymarks as opposed to uploading the same image over and over again. Think of it like having a "library of photos" - once you upload it once, you can then select from your "library" to use it later*. The benefit to GS to implement such a thing would be the "massive" amount of storage space that would be saved. But it doesn't appear that it would be enough for them to bother (because no mistaking that this would require a lot of changes to be made).

*effectively this is already in place. Every time you upload a photo, it gets stored and assigned some unique identifier. That identifier is linked to the waymark to which it is is assigned to. If you upload the same photo a second time, the second upload gets a different unique identifier, and now two copies of the same photo are being stored and only one is needed.  What I'm suggesting is that there be a way to link a photo to multiple waymarks instead of just one. and I'm not talking about links in the HTML sense (as Keith mentions above, although that is a great strategy that I have used a few times myself).

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On 10/29/2018 at 6:15 AM, PISA-caching said:

If I'm not mistaken, every photo is reduced to a maximum length of 2048 pixels at Groundspeak. They also change the compression rate. Therefore, the size of the uploaded photo on your side and the size of the photo stored at Groundspeak can differ a lot. To check my statement I downloaded a photo of one of my first waymarks. It has 2448 x 3264 pixels and 1.76 MB. Then I uploaded the same photo to the same waymark and downloaded it again. And this one had 1536 x 2048 pixels and 526 KB.

 

 

Although the image appears to be smaller, according to the website the original is stored just as you submitted it:

Quote

We will store your original image our image servers, but your image will be resized when it is used in various locations on the Waymarking.com web site.

 

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25 minutes ago, Bon Echo said:

 

Although the image appears to be smaller, according to the website the original is stored just as you submitted it:

 

 

Now that's weird. So, if I upload a high-res photo with 6000x4000 pixels they will store it with that resolution, but nobody will ever see it. Instead the waymarkers will see 2048x1365 pixels. And GS needs storage space for both versions of the photo. It seems that they care more about bandwidth than about storage space. Or is there a different reason for not showing the original size?

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2 hours ago, PISA-caching said:

 

I once approved a waymark that had a typo in the title and some other  minor problems. I told the owner via the acceptance mail to change this and that. A few days later nothing had happened. I sent a personal note to the account (in vain) and in the end I changed the typo and everything else on my own. That has happened to me at least twice. Since then I think twice before I approve a waymark that is not as good as it should be. Don't get me wrong, I don't blame the WM owner, because maybe he/she creates too many waymarks to read all the acceptance mails and maybe she/he is too busy to read personal mails also. But by denying a waymark I get the owners attention for sure, the error can easyly be repaired and resubmitting is just a click with the mouse. So, don't take it personally.

If you knew how many typos are in this officer's waymarks, you'd understand my frustration with mine being declined by him. His own profile states that he knows how sloppy his waymarks are.

 

I'm going to get my husband's help with the photo information this afternoon. I love how Bon Echo described pulling photos from my photo library. Great visual of what way marking could implement.

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To that end, please let me know approximately the following:

1) Typical size of photo in MB per POSTED and per VISITED (if they differ, or just say "same") (guesstimate) : 4.5 MB

2) Typical number of photos per waymark you POST (guesstimate) 5️⃣

3) Typical number of waymarks you create with a same set of photos (explained below in a bit more detail) (guesstimate): 2

4) Typical number of photos per waymark you VISIT: 1

5) Approximate number of waymarks you have POSTED and VISITED: 3,000

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On 10/29/2018 at 3:15 AM, PISA-caching said:

I remember that people were laughing at me, because my first PC had 1 MB Memory and a 40 MB hard drive. Everybody kept asking me "How will you ever fill 40(!) MB???" And talking about floppy: I remember the time when I only had a datasette for my Atari 800XL and received a floppy drive for christmas. And I remember that we used a small tool to convert one-sided 5.25" floppys to double-sided ones. Oh man, I'm ooooooold.

You think YOU'RE old?!?!

My first computer was a Timex clone with NO storage. One could hook a cassette recorder to it to store data and sometimes (though rarely) actually be able to retrieve it. My next computer was a Coleco Adam that had TWO - count 'em TWO, datasettes that worked almost all of the time. Floppies weren't even publicly available yet!

Keith

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On 10/29/2018 at 3:15 AM, PISA-caching said:

If I'm not mistaken, every photo is reduced to a maximum length of 2048 pixels at Groundspeak. They also change the compression rate. Therefore, the size of the uploaded photo on your side and the size of the photo stored at Groundspeak can differ a lot. To check my statement I downloaded a photo of one of my first waymarks. It has 2448 x 3264 pixels and 1.76 MB. Then I uploaded the same photo to the same waymark and downloaded it again. And this one had 1536 x 2048 pixels and 526 KB.

Just downloaded 2 of mine that were 2272 X 1704. They came back the same size BUT had lost their EXIF info. This seems to be new. Had not previously noticed downloaded pix arriving with no EXIF. This could explain why my EXIF Viewer quit working some months ago. Gotta dig deeper.

Keith

... ...So I dug deeper. Older pix, both mine and others, have EXIF info. Newer pix, both mine and others, DON'T!!! This does, indeed, seem to explain the recent failure of the EXIF viewer. Anybody have any idea why???

Edited by BK-Hunters
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12 hours ago, BK-Hunters said:

Just downloaded 2 of mine that were 2272 X 1704. They came back the same size BUT had lost their EXIF info. This seems to be new. Had not previously noticed downloaded pix arriving with no EXIF. This could explain why my EXIF Viewer quit working some months ago. Gotta dig deeper.

Keith

... ...So I dug deeper. Older pix, both mine and others, have EXIF info. Newer pix, both mine and others, DON'T!!! This does, indeed, seem to explain the recent failure of the EXIF viewer. Anybody have any idea why???

 

Did you download 2 recently uploaded photos or older ones? I just uploaded a 3294x2107 photo to an unfinished waymark, opened the preview and then downloaded the photo again and received a 2048x1310 photo.

 

As far as the missing EXIF data one can only speculate. Maybe it is some kind of data protection, so that others don't see the type and serial number of the camera you have used or other data that one can find in the EXIF data.

Edited by PISA-caching
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11 hours ago, PISA-caching said:

 

Did you download 2 recently uploaded photos or older ones? I just uploaded a 3294x2107 photo to an unfinished waymark, opened the preview and then downloaded the photo again and received a 2048x1310 photo.

Recent ones. I looked at older pix (didn't have to download them) and the EXIF viewer showed that the EXIF was still extant. As for the size change, possibly Waymarking DOES enforce a size limit, in that your pix were substantially larger than mine. I have only inadvertently uploaded pix larger than 2272 on the long side. I wish now that I could remember where they were, so I could try downloading them.

 

On the other hand, mebbe it's a political thing and someone at WMing has a distaste for Austrians! ? (Good Gawd, do you think there are enough Emojis now?) But then, how many of us have tasted an Austrian?!?!

 

11 hours ago, PISA-caching said:

As far as the missing EXIF data one can only speculate. Maybe it is some kind of data protection, so that others don't see the type and serial number of the camera you have used or other data that one can find in the EXIF data.

To me, the point of EXIF info at WMing is to check up on cheaters. After approving enough of a given WMer's WMs one can get to know the camera(s) they use. If a single, or even a couple of, pic(x) appear in a WM that were taken with a different camera, that can be the dead giveaway of a "Web lifted pic". Caught one regular WMer that way. They were terribly embarrassed, but had a pretty good reason for doing so. I felt that, in this case, it was no big deal, but the WMer was pretty red faced. Also caught a couple of others who had NO good reason for using others' pix and declined their WMs. Don't recall their trying it again in categories I approve.

 

Further to this discussion is the recent failure of PNGs at Waymarking. I brought this up recently in a parallel thread. PNGs lose their alpha channel when uploaded to WMing, but can be copied from elsewhere and pasted into a WMing page successfully. This, especially, I wish would be fixed.

 

WAYFROG - any chance you could look into this for us? 

Keith

Edited by BK-Hunters
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6 hours ago, BK-Hunters said:

Recent ones. I looked at older pix (didn't have to download them) and the EXIF viewer showed that the EXIF was still extant. As for the size change, possibly Waymarking DOES enforce a size limit, in that your pix were substantially larger than mine. I have only inadvertently uploaded pix larger than 2272 on the long side. I wish now that I could remember where they were, so I could try downloading them.

 

On the other hand, mebbe it's a political thing and someone at WMing has a distaste for Austrians! ? (Good Gawd, do you think there are enough Emojis now?) But then, how many of us have tasted an Austrian?!?!

 

:) I learned something new today. I took the same 3294x2107 photo, reduced the long side to 2200 Pixels (555 KB), uploaded it and it kept its size. I took the orginal photo again, reduced the long side to 3000 pixels (951 KB) and the uploaded photo suddenly had 2048 on the long side. I then took the original photo again, reduced the long side to 3000 pixels and made it completely white, so that the size of the file is very small (68 KB) and the upload kept the size of 3000 pixels. So, it seems that the photos are reduced to a long side of 2048 pixels, if the file size is bigger than some value between 555 KB and 951 KB.

 

I edit 99.9% of my photos with Adobe Photoshop and save them with reduced EXIF data (just copyright and contact Information, which is the setting I need for my job) before I upload them. But I would never use photos that were not taken by me or my lady.

 

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18 hours ago, PISA-caching said:

But I would never use photos that were not taken by me or my lady.

Yeah, but you're not the guy I'm watching out for (or was, before the EXIF thing happened). :)

 

18 hours ago, PISA-caching said:

So, it seems that the photos are reduced to a long side of 2048 pixels, if the file size is bigger than some value between 555 KB and 951 KB

I believe I'll try some more tests along that line. Most of the pix come off my camera at 2272 X XYZ (the XYZ depends on what aspect ratio I'm using or crop to). I know that at 90% compression some are as large as 1.2 Mp. I'll try to find one that fits that description and upload it. Most of mine are around 750 K to 800 K.

Keith

EDIT - I just had a thought. Maybe WMing really is trying to save disk space. My camera will put as much as 100k of EXIF in a pic [EDIT - checked today and the norm is about 65k per pic - that's a lotta dead weight]. That definitely seems like overkill, but it's there, every little setting and parameter one could possibly imagine are recorded.

Edited by BK-Hunters
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