[Openicc] apps dropping color metadata

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 28, 2011, at 2:04 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 
> Ideally we want all applications to not opt-out, right? So it needs to be made easy to do that. If I drag and drop an eciRGB JPEG from the desktop to my email application, of course the JPEG should look correct. If I drop it into OpenOffice for a presentation, of course it should look correct. If I put it into the simplest application, it should look correct.

A question for someone who knows how applications open files, read their contents, interpret them, then pass them onto system services for display. Like a JPEG or TIFF. How does this actually happen?

For example, a JPEG file contains a bunch of information in the file that is not image-data. One piece of data might be EXIF metadata from a camera, including the color space (sRGB or Adobe RGB or other, depending on a setting in the camera), or it might be an ICC profile. It's all in the image file itself. But somehow when applications that support JPEG open the JPEG file, they ignore or strip away this data and only send the image data to the system for displaying the image. And that's why the ICC/EXIF data is dropped.

Is the way to prevent this to encourage applications to effectively send the entire JPEG file to some intermediate service that consistently ensures ICC and/or EXIF are honored on Linux systems? Seems like a huge need. This used to be a big problem on Mac OS until basically Apple created a system wide set of services for managing all of this to ensure metadata wasn't being dropped by applications.


Chris Murphy