Graduation is an amazing accomplishment, and getting quality photos is also another accomplishment.
This year our daughter walked the stage and the school hired a studio to take the Diploma-Holding photos. Today they provided us a link to their pixieset.com shop to view those photos.
These are great photos, and as much as we would like both of them at $27.00 per photo we just cannot afford it. They even went the extra distance of overlaying their advertising/copyright as well as adding in copyright and tag exif metadata within each photo to hammer it home that it’s their property.
…except they forgot one tiny thing about their Canon EOS R5 camera…
Having these photos on our desktop for Windows 10 it might be easy to notice that, in fact, the preview image of the photo is not a resized version of the original. It is, in fact, the embedded thumbnail. The embedded thumbnails happen to be of decent quality, and without the latter image adjustments provided. A bit of PHP later and we can easily extract the thumbnail with exif_read_data():
<?php
$filename = $argv[1];
$metadata = exif_read_data($filename, "THUMBNAIL", false, true);
if (isset($metadata['THUMBNAIL']['THUMBNAIL'])) {
file_put_contents('thumbnail.jpg', $metadata['THUMBNAIL']['THUMBNAIL']);
} else {
echo "thumbnail not found\n";
}The final two extracted images would be the following:
Again, thumbnails, and not the highest quality, but it’s good to see that even modern day photography websites still can’t modify what was originally present in the photograph, and lack of shenanigans is always a great thing when dealing with businesses that need to survive from $27.00 photos.