Snapshots of Gaming History
When extra embedded data turns out to be actually useful. JPEGs and me.
Only a short post today as we've spent a chunk of time travelling to my in-laws.
We've all encountered JPEGfiles at various times during our online existence. For many they were often the opposite of GIF files when you wanted a static image as the compression was good for early internet days.
Nowadays everyone encounters them as output from digital cameras and their mobile phones.
One of the unique features with JPEGs is the most common formats contain a framework for including additional data along with an image.
If you take a photo on your phone it will likely have the make/model as well as some of the camera settings embedded into the image unless you take steps to remove them, either when the image is taken or processing afterwards.
Digital cameras tend to populate the data in quite a verbose way with all facets of the hardware and camera configuration being captured, this can be very useful when looking into different shots and knowing the conditions and settings used at that exact time.
If you have been around the internet long enough, you likely remember having to strip out data like city locations or even latitude and longitude from this EXIF data. Isn't it strange that someone thought the automatic inclusion of that kind of data would be acceptable?
EXIF for good
One of my favourite uses of EXIF data actually came from a game. In the MMO City of Heroes/Villains.screenshots taken in the game would have the EXIF data populated with game-related information, so the common elements were the Zone you were playing, but if you were teamed up, it would include all the character names of your teammates too.
This was great when you had the UI toggled off but could still identify who was in a snapshot.
I often ponder this feature and have been trying to figure out if I could implement something similar into Elder Scrolls Online, since I take a lot of screenshots in the game and it would be great to have the zone name saved automatically along with the map co-ordinates and group list at the time.
Looking back over old screenshots is certainly enhanced by this additional data that gives another level of depth to these digital lives we lead.