Joseph Szymborski has a blog. ↩
I was avoiding getting out of bed when I came across a Mastodon post by @Foone that got me thinking. She had expressed a very reasonable thought, characteristic of her posts✪✪ Ok, for the most part. You should consider buying her a coffee, her feed is great. , to include descriptions in the metadata of image so you wouldn’t have to write and rewrite alt texts every time you upload a file.
Being half awake, eyes recently unglued, mind acclimatizing to the horrors of consciousness, I misread Foone post and my interest was piqued:
For those not in the know, image files can carry extra data about the image, such as information about the camera that took it, GPS coordinates, and all manner of sundry bits and bobs.
Most of the time, this is done using an almost 30 year old standard called Exif (“Exchangeable image file format”). It’s derived from the TIFF file format, and mostly uses pointer offsets to refer to the data.
More recently, the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) standard was put forward by Adobe. XMP stores metadata as in the RDF/XML syntax.
