This phenomenon is an example of image metadata loss. This loss isn’t limited to AVIF; metadata is stripped for all image formats supported by Discourse. AVIF was chosen because its thumbnails stripped image metadata, while original images are not processed.
This is actually due to two bugs:
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Discourse claims to strip metadata for all images, but in reality, it didn’t.
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Stripping metadata even removes color gamut information, compromising the color integrity of the image.