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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.

2 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. 5MB in total - Nothing to see here. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    As can be seen from the link in his comment section, the total of wasted space his tool found was 5MB. On a whole windows system, comprising several GB.
    Even if his tool didn't just find some false positives, that's basically nothing at all.

    Nothing to see here, move along.

  2. Re:Article sounds like B.S. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Clippy says: It looks like you're going full retard. Would you like to learn about RC, the Microsoft Resource Compiler which can be used to embed PNG images into exes and dlls?