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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.

7 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?

    1. Re:How does it "eat up CPU cycles"? by DickBreath · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      --

      I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
  3. 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.

    1. Re:5MB in total - Nothing to see here. by sinij · · Score: 5, Funny

      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!

  4. 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

  5. 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?