I disagree that as web engineers, our goal is to make websites faster. Our goal is to make a website that suits the customer's needs.
Sometimes, that can even mean making a website slower. I've had that request before because end users were surprised that the site loaded so fast. We made stuff slow on purpose so that the user thinks we are crunching data hardcore and giving their request some real thought before presenting the results.
Sure, if the customer asks for ultimate speed and explicitly does not care about image metadata availability, then removing that metadata is fine. But otherwise, removing those few bytes probably won't change how fast your website loads by a significant amount. You're better off working on caching, reducing TTFB, automatically adapting image size to screen size, spriting icons with http1, server push with http2, gzipping, reducing the size of Javascript/CSS and working on perceived speed. This will probably be orders of magnitude more useful to users than removing image metadata. And it won't remove that useful information from images.
Wow! I primarily work on consumer facing web products where speed does play a big part but glad to know where you are coming from. I have not had such request or perspective. :) Thanks for sharing your experience.
Agree, that its not the first thing you should focus on. But saying you should not do it is what I was protesting.
When you run your site through speed analysis tools like the site posted or WebPageTest(my favourite), you do get a set of tasks based on priority and removing exif data is generally low and I am not advocating against that.
Sometimes, that can even mean making a website slower. I've had that request before because end users were surprised that the site loaded so fast. We made stuff slow on purpose so that the user thinks we are crunching data hardcore and giving their request some real thought before presenting the results.
Sure, if the customer asks for ultimate speed and explicitly does not care about image metadata availability, then removing that metadata is fine. But otherwise, removing those few bytes probably won't change how fast your website loads by a significant amount. You're better off working on caching, reducing TTFB, automatically adapting image size to screen size, spriting icons with http1, server push with http2, gzipping, reducing the size of Javascript/CSS and working on perceived speed. This will probably be orders of magnitude more useful to users than removing image metadata. And it won't remove that useful information from images.