I think this is a bug, though maybe it is a feature to make the file size smaller?
I work in the photo industry, in our forum sometimes people post images for others to try to troubleshoot printing issues. The image uploaded could be in a color space other than sRGB like Adobe 98 or ProPhoto RGB.
If I post an image to our Discourse forum that is Adobe 98, when I download that image the profile has been stripped and now it is untagged which is really bad as there is no way to know what the original color space was.
Is this intended? is there a way to not remove the color profile?
Strip image metadata doesn’t mean the color profile should be ignored.
An image that loses its color gamut information is rendered as a different image. And this feature supports a very limited number of image formats.
For example, AVIF does not lose any image metadata, however, the resulting thumbnail is not color managed.
Refer to the image below. Please wait patiently for Discourse to load the preview image, then click to expand the original image. Note the color difference between the two.