1) Sorry that I hit everything in the middle of an outage. I've since edited my blog post to reflect that as it didn't need to be part of the original record.

2) I'd really appreciate consideration of changing the policy of not attributing third party photographs where they are displayed. There are many reasons for this, but primary is that it's an accepted practice to credit photographs with the photograph itself. As well, the Creative Commons attribution restriction does state that the attribution be given in a manner reasonable to the medium and the means. By crediting in a manner that is accepted and practiced in the photographic industry, it helps in a small way to let photographers know if the CC-license their material, it'll be used in a way that respects their wishes. Placing that data one click away is not obvious to users and doesn't feel "right" from the perspective of a copyright holder.

3) EXIF metadata should be preserved, even on resized images. Thumbnails can be recreated, so junking those isn't an issue. But stripping unrecoverable information, especially that which may contain author and license information, is a problem when the images are borrowed and used downstream. I wish I had a good way to strip just thumbnails, but I don't currently know of one. Flickr has the same practice as well, and it's annoying....

I realize that I'm not a part of your community and that I'm injecting an outside viewpoint. And, as a third party, there's only so much I can do. But I'm more than happy to discuss these issues if it is helpful.