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

Posted by msmash on from the what's-happening dept.

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.

3 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Windows is Bloated by decipher_saint · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Full Stop.

    --
    crazy dynamite monkey
  2. How does it "eat up CPU cycles"? by JoeyRox · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The Windows executable loader doesn't look at this extraneous XMP data so why would it consume CPU cycles?

  3. I don't think blaming Adobe is fair here by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Though XMP was developed by Adobe it is now an ISO standard. Also almost every editor or camera will include XMP data, not just photoshop