EXIF lost via Windows Live Mail?

When I share photos with a friend via email (Windows Live Mail) - he always complains that the EXIF data is stripped, and he wants to see that info.

I have found that if I send via the Comcast.net website email- the exif is available.

Windows Live Mail seems to strip it.

Is there a setting I can change in WLM to fix this? If not, what is your favorite email program that likes photographers?


Jim

One person wrote back in 2007, "One major item (with Windows Live Mail) that needs addressed is the exif info. You can view the properties just as you would in Windows Explorer and see exif info in a dialog box. However, it would be much more useful if the exif data showed in the info pane."

In 2014 another person wrote, "In Windows 7 when right-clicking on an image and selecting "Send to" and "Mail Recipient" and then selecting a size reduction the image is stripped of its EXIF metadata. This was not the case in Windows XP."

Upload them to dropbox and send your friend the link to that instead?

This can be a problem when embedding an image file in another document, you have to rely on the application doing the processing to not do stuff you don't want. JPEG files are obviously of a format that the system can get away with reprocessing to reduce the amount of data. For an email service provider reducing data, both for storage and transmission, although pretty insignificant on an individual level is pretty immense when you consider total traffic. There is one simple way to ensure that your email provider doesn't mess with your images. Simply convert the image to a zip file. Although putting a JPEG file inside a zip file won't reduce the size of the data significantly, you might get a bit from compressing the text components and any attached colour profile, it will now be in a file format that the service provider cannot change without corrupting the file. Windows Explorer, or whatever they call it these days handles zip files pretty well now.

You have to be a little careful with services like Dropbox, since the link you send takes the viewer to a web page with a built in viewer system. While viewing the image in this system you are actually looking at a (usually) smaller sized preview with heavy compression etc. For the same data storage reasons, plus this also works on tablets and phones. If the person viewing the image simply does a right click save, they end up saving the preview, not the original image file. To get the original image you need to specifically use the download file option that Dropbox supply. I would expect Google Docs, and the similar Microsoft and Apple systems do much the same with image files.

I'm a Gmail user, and checking the settings for Gmail I see that they actually send images embedded in an email message, the sort that open automatically, via a proxy server, where they are transcoded. Whenever you see transcoding mentioned you may be sure that will result in the addition of extra levels of JPEG compression, and the stripping of any extraneous data, including attached colour profiles. I would expect most other services are much the same.

Alan

Really appreciate all of your responses!

Jim