Windows is Bloated, Thanks to Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (bit.ly)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the weekend, I put together a little tool that scans executable files for PNG images containing useless Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) metadata. I ran it against a vanilla Windows 10 image and was surprised that Windows contains a lot of this stuff. Adobe XMP, generally speaking, is an Adobe technology that serializes metadata like titles, internal identifiers, GPS coordinates, and color information into XML and jams it into things, like images. This data can be extremely valuable in some cases but Windows doesn't need or use this stuff. It just eats up disk space and CPU cycles. Thanks to horrible Adobe Photoshop defaults, it's very easy to unknowingly include this metadata in your final image assets. So easy, almost all the images on this site are chock full of it. But you can appreciate my surprise when a bunch of important Windows binaries showed up in my tool.

Comments

Re:5MB in total - Nothing to see here.

[sinij]

As can be seen from the link in his comment section, the total of wasted space his tool found was 5MB.

This is well over 7500 punch cards, you insensitive clod. This would cover multiple foodball fields!

Re:How does it "eat up CPU cycles"?

[DickBreath]

The AARP is sponsoring a study about the environmental impact of the feet of young people upon lawns.