Post #1078522

2026-03-25 12:34 UTC

One for the #reproducibility nerds Is there an accepted standard (or just some good examples) of how to include provenance metadata within computationally produced images My specific use case is graphs generated by plotly (python) saved as png where I&#39;d like to record some things like date, software version, data version in the image metadata There are exif elements for date and &quot;software&quot; but is there a better solution than just shoving info in the description and/or title field? Something that can survive passage through a presentation an added bonus! (And yes, I do want this in the image metadata, not as a separate file, I&#39;ll use the same info to write out a separate manifest)

Replies (3)

@nemobis@mamot.fr 2026-03-25 13:09

@cameronneylon Interesting question! I know about https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Attribution_Generator for #CreativeCommons images (verbatim) reuse and I see that e.g. #MediaWiki extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Chart produces SVG files without any such metadata inside (presumably because they're not supposed to be downloaded?).

Open ##1078525
@quachpas@social.sciences.re 2026-03-25 13:33

@cameronneylon I don't think there is an "accepted standard". Probably the most generic you could use is Dublin Core. There is a XMP dc namespace https://www.exiftool.org/TagNames/XMP.html#dc which could be used to add metadata to the image directly. > Something that can survive passage through a presentation an added bonus! I wouldn't trust any processing steps to preserve image metadata though. I think most softwares just strip an image clean before using it.

Open ##1078526
@Artemis201@mstdn.social 2026-03-25 17:36

@cameronneylon Astronomy uses fits files for storing data, and usually has a lot of info in the header about the processing history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITS

Open ##1078529