Almost all image formats support EXIF data for metadata… JPEG, JXL, TIFF, WebP. Other formats like SVG (<metadata> & rdf + cc namespaces) & PNG textual information support a method of attaching metadata related to file. Metadata content can be critical for authorship & maintaining the license of an image (such as CC BY-*). This can help track down the maker, or deter LLM training with an attribution clause or whatever the use case is.
What I would like to see is Aseprite support EXIF or a similar metadata scheme used by these other formats. I would also expect this metadata to also be exported to the output formats as well so the license isn’t lost & proper tooling can help show this metadata (such as Flickr not stripping EXIF data but using it to prefill inputs for upload, as well as showing off the tools used to help other artists/photographers understand more about how the digital art was made).
How I would expect this to work is extending the ImageSpec with metadata or exif key with a yet-to-be-defined value on the table for said metadata for use with scripting. As far as how to add it to the binary .aseprite file, there are examples from JPEG / TIFF that could be followed as an example. Considering TinyEXIF is being added as a dependency for JPEG orientation support, it might be be easy to just use the EXIF format in that field without having to invent a new format or add yet another dependency, but I am unsure of the technical challenge in doing so. To me the most important fields to support are Name/Title, Description, Artist/Author/Creator/Maker, Collaborators/Contributors/Helpers, Publisher, & the Copyright/License/Rights.
The location should be under Sprite > Properties…
Naïvely attempting to use exiftool:
$ exiftool -writeMode wcg -overwrite_original -Artist=toastal sprite.ase
Error: Writing of this type of file is not supported - sprite.ase
0 image files updated
1 files weren't updated due to errors
But if image/aseprite is added to exiftool upstream, it would be easy to automate tagging & modifying files too!
Prior arts:
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GIMP
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Inkscape
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Krita
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Darktable
