Geotagging photos is great, but we should make it easy to strip it out in some cases.
There's no reason to have GPS metadata in pictures of e.g. common household items that some unsuspecting Wikipedian has taken in their living room, and then found that their house's full GPS co-ordinates are now on the internets.
Version: 1.16.x
Severity: enhancement
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T218057 Determine workflow to selectively purge potentially privacy-sensitive EXIF fields, such as geocoordinates, from a Wikimedia Commons file | |||
| Open | Feature | None | T222675 Explore possibilities for users to remove/exclude geo data from EXIF on images | ||
| Open | Feature | None | T22326 Option to strip some metadata on upload (GPS/geolocation privacy) | ||
| Open | Feature | None | T18437 Ability to preview vector/re-rendered images in Special:Upload "warning" interstitial. |
Ideal interface is probably something like:
*chug chug chug it uploads*
metadata
a map*
location data, or cancel the upload.
Check out my dupe bug for a description of why more than just GPS EXIF data needs to possible to remove. (The keywords "EXIF" and "EXIF data" are now in this bug report, so it'll turn up for people searching for dupes.)
For me it would be nice if if it actually get the GPS data and use it in the location template, right now I need to add GPS to images from my phone (I take pictures with DSLR without GSP) and then use in upload, extract the GPS coordinate and put it as {{location}} string in more info, since putting just numbers in input field, give error that number need to be between 180 and -180 event that I put proper GPS floating point number.
So basically I need to manually add location even that the upload can use data from EXIF which should be trivial to add, it can have option and warning about privacy but require an action to strip off GPS data, or force to select an option. For Wikimedia Commons I take pictures mostly of architecture and I want GPS data to be inside the file and inside the page with the file, so there should be an option to include them.
I can help with development of this feature, but I'm new to phabricator and media wiki and don't know where to start. I'm not sure where to search for upload wizard. Is it in MediaWiki repo or is this extension?
@Jcubic: Hi and thanks for your interest! In general, I'd point to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker , probably in the /includes/upload/ folder of MediaWiki Core.
Also see T37514 for some more background.
What's the current solution for this problem? Download the image, remove the data, reupload the image, delete old version?
I don't think it will work. I wanted to change the GPS data. I've uploaded a new file but the GPS didn't change.
+1, we need a solution for this. It's been 10 years, and in my opinion, it should not be considered a low priority. Privacy is paramount, and asking to manually remove GPS metadata is counterproductive
There was some discussion about this in the Wikipedia weekly Facebook channel. I'm summarizing the conversation here so it's not lost so please don't shoot the messenger :-). I've anonymized all this feedback - but if you want me to credit you for any of this please drop me a note in Facebook:
The easiest thing to do here would be to make sure the end user knows that they should strip location data before uploading. Apparently we already do this in UploadWizard but not other upload workflows. This is very much a case of patch-welcome if somebody wants to do that. It could be a warning box or note on the uploading workflow (perhaps during the upload itself "This contains location data are you sure you want to upload it?" for example.
One complicating factor is that uploadwizard refuses to upload any files with warnings on them afaik.