It doesn’t intentionally remove it, but when you are resizing an image, you’re actually creating a brand new image. So the problem is that the graphics library used by most sites does not copy metadata from the old/original image to the new one.
There are a couple options to fix this problem:
1. See if you can enable the “imagick” (ImageMagick) extension for PHP, many webhosts allow you to do this via cpanel, in the php settings.
2. Use the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin for resizing instead. It includes the PEL extension which will copy metadata right after the new/resized image is created (assuming you turn off the “remove metadata” option).
Thank you very much for the answer. EWWW Image Optimizer preserves Exif data.
Just to make sure I didn’t confuse you there, EXIF is part of the embedded “metadata”, so I use those terms interchangeably. Of course, that’s different than the attachment “metadata” WordPress stores in the database, so the EXIF-style metadata is what I was referring to.
