Many AI image generators, including the big UIs for Stable Diffusion, helpfully embed metadata in the images so that you can load them up again and get all the settings you need to regenerate the image.
But Lemmy’s built-in pict-rs image hoster, and most image hosters that resize or re-encode images or that try and stop people from doxing themselves with photos’ embedded GPS coordinates, will remove all the metadata. This is counter-productive for AI image generation, because part of the point of sharing the images is so other people can build on the prompts.
What are some good places to host images that don’t strip metadata?
https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/pict-rs
Pictrs has all sorts of settings. Might be worth exploring what could be changed to prevent this and ask the instance admin to adapt the settings.
I am also seeing similar problems with photo rotation not being preserved on upload, which might be nice to find a fix for.
The rotation thing is probably the metadata being stripped too. Instead of encoding the image the right way up or re-encoding if someone rotates, often phones will very quickly “rotate” an image by just adding some metadata saying which way up you should draw it. If the metadata is dropped and the image isn’t re-encode the right way up at the same time, then the image goes back to being drawn in whatever orientation it came off the sensor.
Exactly, this is why I mentioned it :)