I would love an open image format that has alt text baked into the file format and can be read by other apps.
I'd love to see writing alt text done closer to the source, with an ability to customize the existing description for more specific descriptions by other people using the image.
@slimepsychic Maybe it's not too late. Not every image format supports EXIF (which is fair, it's a nightmare) but we could try setting that standard now.
This'd probably involve me having to write code for Mastodon, which is certainly possible.
I thought of Exif at first, too. From reading the Wikipedia page there are technical issues with Exif that result in it being regularly dropped any time a file is edited. A metadata format that is unreliable is ... problematic.
Fortunately, there is also XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) which is also supported in more file formats. That pulls in metadata from Dublin Core which includes a standard "description" field.
In any case, there are multiple metadata formats which support this. It is just a matter of having end-user software that cares about it.
@yam655 @slimepsychic Yeah, and both EXIF and XMP have the issue where quite a lot of software intentionally drops them for safety reasons. (Which is understandable) And, of course, different file formats use one or the other.
Probably the largest issue, honestly, is many of the image processing libraries you might use drop all these metadata segments because it's so much harder to support than the actual image bits are.
@yam655 @slimepsychic I gave a go at integrating metadata support into the Go image reading libraries and got to dive into XMP, EXIF, and some other random metadata stuff that gets attached to images.
My big takeaway was it was worth nope'ing out from as too much work to do just for fun, but I didn't have anything specific (besides vague grumpy spite at the fact that metadata wasn't supported) to push it to completion.
slimepsychic
Dan Sugalski
Steven