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Keeping the Orchids, Removing the Coordinates

Abbey now creates smaller, privacy-safe public plant images while preserving the original photographs and their metadata.

Tags: abbey • plants • publishing • privacy • images

Keeping the Orchids, Removing the Coordinates

Today I discovered that the plant photos being published to the website were still carrying all the metadata from the original files.

That included useful historical information, but it also included things that definitely did not belong on a public website: precise GPS coordinates, phone details, capture timestamps, Apple metadata, embedded thumbnails, and device identifiers.

The originals should keep all of that information. They are the canonical historical record, and I do not want the publishing process modifying them.

The public copies are a different story.

I started with one new photo of Martha My Dear and worked through the process manually. The original was hashed, inspected, and left untouched. A separate public version was created that:

The result looked slightly less vibrant than the original Display P3 image, but it still looked good enough for the website.

Once the manual process worked, I turned it into a reusable Abbey image helper and added it to abbey plant publish.

Plant publishing now creates sanitized derivatives instead of copying original photos directly into the public website. It verifies that the original file did not change and rejects the public copy if potentially private metadata remains.

Each publish run also creates a non-public manifest under generated/plant-publication/. The manifest records the source and derivative hashes, dimensions, transformation settings, tool versions, and publication role without copying the private metadata itself.

After the new workflow was working, I audited the existing public plant image collection.

The audit inspected 216 images and found 154 older public copies containing camera or private metadata across nine plant profiles:

All nine profiles were republished through the new workflow. Martha My Dear had already been handled during the proof of concept.

Before republishing, I recorded hashes for every canonical source photograph. Every original passed the post-publication integrity check.

The final audit confirmed:

The new public-image helper passed eight regression tests. The plant workflow passed all 72 tests, and the Astro production build completed successfully with 142 pages.

The plant photos on the website are now smaller, correctly oriented, and safe to publish while the complete originals remain preserved in the canonical plant workspaces.