I am in Windows 10 x64, in Windows 11 x64, in Windows 11 Arm64, in Windows 7 x32, in Windows XP x32, and in macOS 15 Apple silicon.
The metadata way is a dumb method, and Windows is a dumb OS regarding JPEG support.
For more info see my post in Rotate images using linked viewer.
Dalija Prasnikar is a respected member in the Delphi development community.
Look what she has to say in the Moving from W10 -> W11 thread:
But who honestly wants to go back to 98 or XP?
I would go back to Vista or Win 7 in blink of an eye. I would be thrilled if I could have stayed on Win 10, too.
Windows 11 is by far the worst Windows version ever (and I could not believe this was possible after Windows 8). There are zero new features I want to have and they messed up everything else.
For start half of the things no longer cannot be configured. Taskbar height is too big, colors and icons are awful, Windows theme even worse (selection colors, checkboxes, and similar), you need ten clicks more to do things, fonts are total nightmare and cannot be uninstalled. Whoever designed that Cascadia Mono font needs to be tarred and feathered. It is absolutely illegible and half of the websites are using it as the default monospace font.
And this is just scratching the surface...
Well, I wouldn't go as far as Dalija - the latest Windows 11 2024 Update (Version 24H2) is somewhat usable (after finally adding jump lists in the start menu). But there are still serious flaws (e.g. the Taskbar height issue) so that I will stay in Windows 10 as long as possible on the main system.
I'm sorry, I don't have the time to list all use cases where JPEG images are used without metadata, and I have no intention to convince you with a particular example.
With jpegtran or Jpegcrop, you can strip all metadata off a JPEG file (-copy none), and the image will still be properly reconstructed.
The conclusion is simple:
Metadata is not the right place for information which is essential for proper image reconstruction.
Period.
It has nothing to do with 2025, and it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree.
Quite the contrary:
Opus has up to date JPEG 9 support, while Windows supports only JPEG 6, which is the JPEG development status of year 1998.
So Opus is the .docx supporter, and you want to use only Windows 98 and plain text.
Regards
Guido
JPEG developer