I wonder if anyone has proposed a PNG/EXIF extension to let you embed an image description in an image file. It'd live with the image so as you upload it to different sites, the description stays with it
@foone It may on balance be worthwhile, though for many or most alt text uses a singular description of an image is not as useful as one might think—it’s almost always really critical to describe an image based on the purpose you intend for it rather then a detailed description—otherwise the description is just too long and full of pointless detail.
Still, sometimes this would be excellent, like for reusable memes and such where the essentials are what matters and reuse is common!
@foone
I sort my pictures with #digicam and also give them titles, descriptions and tags. The camera added metadata, too (e.g shutter speed, focal length).
When I upload them to a #piwigo server these metadata are used as intended.
(If remember correctly, Flickr did use these metadata, too)
@foone yeah as others have said, XMP has fields for that, though support is spotty. I actually did some work on a Rust tool to read/write it, though I never finished.
(The big catch other than lack of support is that accessible description of an image are context-dependant)
This blog post describes a plant for better accessibility in GNOME and proposes standardizing a form of structured image descriptions for screenshots. Kinda cool!
@foone yep. it exists. I typically use XMP metadata during image processing jobs, which has a text field for 'description' and many others. it's fairly standard for XMP tooling to be included in the app's base features.
> The Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is an ISO standard, originally created by Adobe Systems Inc., for the creation, processing and interchange of standardized and custom metadata for digital documents and data sets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform
@foone i've actually been doing exactly this with my images for a while now using exiftool -Description
the stored descriptions are displayed in the inspector window when i open my images in preview.app, but barely anything else seems to be aware of it, so it's probably not a standardised thing to do :blobcatgooglyshrug:
@foone They wouldn't be as durable as you'd hope. So many sites strip EXIF anyway to remove GeoIP, and descriptions would probably get stripped too since I'm sure there would be a lot of "Picture I took of my beautiful daughter Jane Smith, SSN 123-45-6789, as we sit on the lawn in front of our house at 123 Main Street".
@foone I'd like more than one such field, one is describing what the image is of, for those who can't see it, the other is explaining the context of the picture, for everyone