Inconsistent default EXIF handling between GD and Imagick drivers

[marc31]

Describe the bug

Hi,

I’d like to report an inconsistency in how EXIF metadata are handled depending on the image driver (GD or Imagick) used by Intervention/Image.

This issue was initially discussed in the context of Glide, which relies on Intervention/Image:
thephpleague/glide#445

Current behavior

• GD driver
  EXIF metadata are always stripped, with no option to preserve them.

• Imagick driver
  If the strip option is not specified, all EXIF metadata are preserved
  If strip = true, EXIF metadata are removed while color profiles are preserved (which is great and expected)

Expected behavior

Ideally, metadata handling should be consistent by default across drivers.

Possible approaches :

• Make both drivers behave as if strip = true by default
• Or require explicit opt-in / opt-out for metadata stripping regardless of driver
• Or clearly document and expose consistent defaults across drivers

The current strip option for Imagick works very well (removes EXIF while preserving color profiles), so this feels mostly like a default behavior alignment issue.

Environment (please complete the following information):

• PHP Version: 8.4
• OS: Docker linux
• Intervention Image Version: 3.11.7
• GD and Imagick

[olivervogel]

Yes, that is known. Unfortunately, none of the GD functions, such as imagejpeg(), preserve metadata.

Therefore, in my opinion, achieving consistent cross-driver behaviour without further dependencies is not possible, since GD always discards it.

Setting strip to true as the default value for all drivers is not effective, as setting it to false would result in inconsistencies again.

However, this could be documented more clearly.

[marc31]

Thanks for the clarification, that makes sense

I understand the limitation with GD and the fact that functions like imagejpeg() do not preserve metadata, which makes perfectly consistent behaviour across drivers difficult without additional dependencies.

I agree that improving the documentation would already help a lot, especially to make it clearer that:

• GD will always discard metadata
• Imagick preserves them unless strip is used

That would make the behaviour much more predictable for users.

I was initially wondering whether it would be possible to extract EXIF metadata (when the PHP exif extension is available) and re-inject them after processing, but it seems PHP does not provide native functions to write EXIF metadata, only to read them. So that approach would likely require additional tooling or dependencies.

So clearer documentation about the different behaviours between drivers would probably be the best solution.

Thanks again for the explanation and for maintaining the library!