I managed to convince my whole family to move to Signal and it’s great. But Signal automatically strips the metadata of all pictures. So now when my family sends me pictures I don’t have any of the metadata and it’s really annoying.
Does anyone have a solution?
Thanks!
I don’t think there is a option to disable metadata striping in Signal. Maybe your family could share the pictures in some other way, but I don’t think it would be really convenient for them.
I finally managed to get then onto Signal and they always simply share the pictures on the group.
I think the only other option is an alternate to Signal that doesn’t strip the metadata. I believe that session also strips it, so I don’t know if there are any good alternatives.
I feel ya. Seen more than one side of this.
I use sharing to Signal’s “notes to myself” as a way to strip metadata from images before upload elsewhere. I prefer this over installing another app.
Then again, I exported images from my photo library, and found that I’d saved some images from Signal a while ago, meaning they had no metadata, and when I reimport into another library, I have to manually set the date. Fiddling with exiftool to make my life easier, but damn.
I use that too, but it’s upsetting not to have metadata in my pics I upload to Ente
Hi, can I ask why you want the pictures to have metadata?
I want Ente to sort it it by location and date
I wish signal would at least give the option to disable it.
Matrix is simply so complicated to use
Did you try sending the images as files? I don’t use Signal much these days, but I would say that when you send them as files, you avoid the photos’ metadata being removed, and at the same time, you maintain the quality. At least, this is how it works with WhatsApp/Telegram; I don’t think the functionality would be different there.
I think you’re right, but that would be very complicated for my family to do.
Unless the option to send higher-quality images also preserves the metadata, which I doubt, to be honest, I can’t think of many alternatives. It’s likely something handled on the server side.
It’s actually something they probably built into the app itself cause it doesn’t strip when sent from the desktop app
I’m not OP but metadata is quite useful for many things. With photos it is useful for either chronological or geographical sorting, or with more advanced photos apps things like a ‘map view’ or ‘timeline view’ or ‘people/faces’ etc.
This is OP and I give you a resounding amen!
My non tech savvy family doesn’t want/know how to do that, they just want to send messages and pictures in the family group chat. 
You’re right, I didn’t realize that.
Does it keep the metadata? Original quality?
Thank you!