This is due to a Photoshop limitation in the new plugins API and I don’t have a workaround for it.

The issue isn’t that it is losing meta/exif data. It is that Photoshop is not allowing it to create the meta data in the composite.

When creating composites, the player image is placed into a template. Therefore, the meta data of the composite will be the EXIF data, or lack of EXIF data, from whatever is saved in the template itself. The same thing happens if you create composites manually in Photoshop without SPA. If you add an image into a template, the final composite will never have the meta data from the player. You can text the by building a compositie manually in Photoshop. You will find that just by the nature of copying an image into a template, the meat data will be gone in the composite. So it isn’t something being done by SPA. It is just how it works when merging images together.

In order to solve this, I programmed SPA to copy all of the meta data from the player images and overwrite the existing meta data in the composite. This worked at one point. However, in Photoshop new API, the meta data copying doesn’t work correctly. It gets stuck and always uses the data from the first image. I spent hours trying to figure out a work around. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that it just isn’t possible right now. Adobe doesn’t even have an “official” way to access or write meta data from the plugins API so it isn’t something I can even report as a bug either. The way I was doing it was unofficially and beyond what the plugins API was suppose to be able to do anyway I think.

Adobe said that a new meta data handling system in the plugins API was in the future plans. However, the have no release date for the feature.

So as it stands now, if you really need meta data then you can use SPA 7 in CC 2021. SPA 7 runs on the old plugins API which is being discontinue

Let mw know if you want an installer for SPA 7 and I can send it to you.