Does compression remove the AI tag Merchant Center asks for? 10 tools, WordPress and Iminify tested
Google's Merchant Center help says: "Don't remove embedded metadata tags such as trainedAlgorithmicMedia from such images. All AI-generated images must contain the IPTC DigitalSourceType trainedAlgorithmicMedia tag." (Merchant Center's help page is dated February 2024; we read it on 26 October 2026.) So we put that tag on two AI images, a harbour scene from Nano Banana 2 (a JPEG) and a bakery illustration from the original Nano Banana (a PNG), ran them through 42 command-line runs and Iminify, added three larger JPEGs for a WordPress 7.1.3 site, and read the tag back with ExifTool each time. Each tool's default decides whether the tag survives, and neither lossy nor lossless predicts it. Of the ten tools in our table, four keep the tag at their defaults and six drop it, and for nine of them we found an option that flips that. Iminify, which is our product, lost it at every level that compresses: it survived in 6 of 51 uploads, and those six came back byte for byte unchanged. One ExifTool command puts the tag back for 514 to 568 bytes and, on the nine files we checked, leaves every pixel alone.