11–20 of 84 posts
It feels like creating a custom format with backwards PNG compatibility and using steganography to cram metadata inside is an inefficient and over-engineered alternative to a .tar.gz with "image.png" and "metadata.json"
Why not simply JXL? It has multiple channels, can store any metadata, is lossy/lossless.
Also I also remember when I discovered steganography and tried putting it in everything. I was 13. Seriously, what's the point of that?
> Instead of storing metadata alongside the image where it can be lost, MEOW ENCODES it directly inside the image pixels using LSB steganography That makes the data much more fragile than metadata fields, though? Any kind of image alteration or re-encoding (which almost all sites do to ensure better compression — discord, imgur, et al) is going to trash the metadata or make it utterly useless. I'll be honest, I don't…
Your extra data is a big JSON blob. Okay, fine.
File formats dating back to Targa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truevision_TGA) support arbitrary text blobs if you're weird enough.
PNG itself has both EXIF data and a more general text chunk mechanism (both compressed and uncompressed, https://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/PNG-Chunks.html#C.An... , section 4.2.3, you probably want iTXt chunks).
exiftool will already let you do all of this, by the way. There's no reason to summon non-standard file format into the world (especially when you're just making a weird version of PNG that won't survive resizing or quantization properly).
> it gets stripped way too easily when sharing that's not a bug, that's a (security) feature
If you're a proud generative AI user, and you don't want anyone deceived by your images, you want the this-was-created-by-ai metadata retained.
Reality check: Your extra data is a big JSON blob. Okay, fine. File formats dating back to Targa ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truevision_TGA ) support arbitrary text blobs if you're weird enough. PNG itself has both EXIF data and a more general text chunk mechanism (both compressed and uncompressed, https://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/PNG-Chunks.html#C.An... , section 4.2.3, you probably want iTXt chunks). exi…
> exiftool -config exiftool.config -overwrite_original -z '-_custom1and
> exiftool -config exiftool.config -G1 -Tag_custom1 cat.png
You can (with AI help no less) figure out what `exiftool.config` should look like. `meta.json` is just your JSON from github.
Now go draw the rest of the owl. :)
Look how many confused comments there are due to the page claiming features you don't have, don't understand, and don't make sense on their own terms (what's an "attention map"? with maximum charity, if we had some sort of attention-as-in-LLM-like structure precached, how would it apply beyond one model? how big would the image be? is it possible to fit that in the 2 bits we claim to fit in every 4 bytes)
I don't want for you to take it personally, at all, but I never, ever, want to see something like this on the front page again.
You've reinvented EXIF and JPEG metadata, in the voice of a diligent teenager desiring to create something meaningful, but with 0 understanding of the computing layers, 4 hours with Wikipedia, and 0 intellectual humility - though, with youth, born not from obstinance, but naiveté.
Some warning signs you should have taken heed of:
- Metadata is universally desirable, yet, somehow unexplored until now?
- Your setup instructions use UNIX commands up until they require running a Windows batch file
- The example of hiding data hides it in 2 bits in a channel then "demonstrates" this is visually lossless because its hidden in 1 bit across 2 channels (it isn't, because if it was, how would we determine which 2 of the channels?) ("visually lossless" confuses "lossless", a technical term meaning no information was lost with a weaker claim of being lossy-but-not-detectably-so)
I'll leave it here, I think you have the idea and there's a difference between being firm and honest, and being cruel, and length will dictate a lot of that to a casual observer.