Context and motivation

WordPress already provides some tools to detect and store metadata from EXIF files in the media gallery modal. We can see some of them even on the upload flow. For example, here it detected the file name, type, bytes size, dimensions and creation date:

This is stored in the wp-media endpoint. We've been asked if we could come up with ways of displaying this more prominently, as if it was really an item metadata instead of a hidden information bind only to the attachment.

However this is not to be confused with storing this in actual metadata, since we're talking about something that might not be desired to be edited (what is the purpose of changing the image size or ISO information if that information come from the file) and also it is not really an information per item, but per attachment. In the future we can even consider how would this relate to the incoming Attachment metadata type... but it would still be a separate information.

Still, if the information is stored somehow in the item, it should be searchable, maybe filterable and ideally exportable.

One thing that I am not sure is exactly which EXIF infos WordPress already extracts and if there is something else we should do to expand them. We could also test some integrations with plugins that already do this and even offer the option to edit them directly in the media gallery modal.

Ideal solution

We need to store this somehow with the item, maybe a control metadata? As of visualization I can see this going either as a sort of special metadata section or as new visualization tools integrated to our media gallery. Maybe an "info icon" that appears next to files which you could click or hover to see this type of information.