18779 - displaying textual data inside .GIF and .PNG files

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Graphics: ImageLib, enhancement, P3)

Description

[mahjongg]

several picture file formats as .GIF and especially .PNG have text "chunks" in
their internal file format to embed comments and other textual information
inside the picture file.
For example .GIF has a "comment" text field and .PNG has "chunks" for:

Image title
Author
Description (of image)
Copyright notice
Creation time
Software used to create image
Disclaimer
Warning (nature of content)
Source (device used to create image)
and a general comment field for conversion from .GIF files

Also .PNG has other "chunks" that provide valuable information on
data of last image change

Furthermore there is information available on the image size, image type
(grayscale, truecolour, indexed colour), file size, file creation date etc etc.

why not, when right clicking on the image, create a menu entry with "image
properties" which calls up a window that gives all the relevant information and
a button which when pressed calls up the editor and loads it with all the
textual information contained within the image. (note that this can be a _lot_
of text).

Comment 1

[shuang (gone)]

Having image property might be useful for only advanced users, but not that
useful for 90% of the normal users on the net. thoughts?

Comment 2

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

If might be useful as a tooltip if no title was specified.

Comment 3

[german]

Interesting enhancement. Forwarding to Pam, since she's the only person I know
that's working on PNG. Pam feel free to reassign if I have hit you with a bug
that does not belong to you. I consider it a good request from the "if there is
time" category.

Comment 4

[pnunn]

a good idea.
I'm posting a target milestone way ahead.
If I get more time, it may be sooner.
-pn

Comment 5

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

Bug 1995 and bug 1994 could make use of this info. Marking as dependencies,
but not particularly important ones.

e.g., when image loading is disabled and there is no 'alt' text, the HTML spec
says we could use the info actually in the image file as the alt text.

Comment 6

[ekrock's old account (dead)]

Changed to all-caps [ENH] for code naming rules consistency.

Comment 7

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

The dependency on bug 1994 has been replaced with a dependency on bug 24126,
marked LATER.

Comment 8

[leger]

Moving all UE/UI bugs to new component: User Interface: Design Feedback
UE/UI component will be deleted.

Comment 9

[Eli Goldberg]

Moving non-feedback items out of UI: DF in preparation for handover to 
[e-mail].

Comment 10

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

This information is a little too much for a tooltip. Displaying the information in "Page Info" 
could be a better choice.

Comment 11

[Daniel Brooks [:db48x]]

Adding this to Page Info is a good idea. The information can be added quite
simply, though it will have to be available from js. Currently I can get an
HTMLImageElement for each one, so addign it to there wouldn't be a bad idea,
though I really don't know if there's a simple way to do it. If it ends up as a
javascript array of field name/data pairs or something, I can easily show
everything thats in the image without resorting to trying to specifically do
different things for different image types, which would be more work than it's
worth.

Comment 12

[pnunn]

All pnunn bugs reassigned to Pav, who is taking over
the imglib.

Comment 13

[Alexey Chernyak]

I think .JPEG files can store Metadata in them too.

Comment 14

[Greg K.]

Yes, on JPEGs. I have filed a bug specifically about them as bug 106068.

Comment 15

[Greg K.]

See also EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) metadata ([http://exif.org/]).

Comment 16

[WulfTheSaxon [:Wulf]]

I think this would be a great feature, along with support for EXIF (bug 232806) and the previously mentioned IPTC (bug 102068). However, I can't seem to find any mention of using internal metadata for alt text in the HTML spec. It certainly sounds like a good idea, though.

I'm surprised that there hasn't been any further discussion about this in the last 6 years.

Comment 17

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

At this point we do not intend to make this work. An extension could be created to support this.

Comment 18

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by ffxbld-merge:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/rev/dc70a52484d0
[fenix] No issue - Make TabLayoutMediator lifecycle aware (https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/pull/18779)