Pictures uploading sideways

[TerranSeven]

I have uploaded a few photos lately that have been appearing sideways.

I use my iPhone to take most of the photos and upload them onto my computer via iPhoto. In iPhoto they show upright, and when I locate the files they appear upright, both in thumbnail, and when i open them.

I'm perplexed as to why they're all uploading sideways. I need them to be rotated 90º clockwise, is there any way I can do this?

thanks for the help.

-Z

[Panamon-Creel]

Panoramio doesn't use the Auto-rotate data in the Exif and you must correct rotation prior to upload. If you use windows you can see the rotation if you browse via file explorer with thumbnail view.

[TerranSeven]

Quote Panamon_Creel:

Panoramio doesn't use the Auto-rotate data in the Exif and you must correct rotation prior to upload. If you use windows you can see the rotation if you browse via file explorer with thumbnail view.

Exif?

I am not familiar with this term/acronym.

[Panamon-Creel]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exif

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata

[Matthew Winn]

Early digital cameras didn't have the speed or memory to rotate images quickly enough for users to tolerate, so the method used was to store the image in the orientation it had when it came off the sensor and then add a flag to the image to say which way up the image ought to be. The image was supposed to be rotated later.

In retrospect it was a really stupid idea, as it puts the onus on all image viewing software to include code to rotate images rather than just having one program to put the image the right way up to start with. What makes it worse is that some programs corrupt the flag so it can't be trusted, which means that in practice the only way for a program to be absolutely certain which way up an image should be is to show it to a human and let them decide. If a program never honours the flag (or doesn't include the code to recognise it) then unprocessed images can appear the wrong way up. If a program does honour the flag but processing has put the image and flag out of step then the image will also appear the wrong way up. It's a lose-lose situation. That's the situation Panoramio is in: your iPhoto rotates the image every time you view it but Panoramio shows the image as it really is.

It's as stupid as printing books backwards and expecting every reader in the world to carry a mirror with them so they can read the reversed print more easily instead of simply printing the text the right way round in the first place, and with the added complication that you can't tell for sure whether you'll need a mirror until you actually try reading the text.

The best thing you can do with digital images is to use a viewing program that allows you to disable automatic rotation so you can see the real orientation of the pictures and then rotate them manually so they're the right way up, clearing the flag in the process. Then everybody will see the images the same way. On Windows IrfanView does a good job of this; press J and select one of the rotation options. I don't know about other platforms.

[TerranSeven]

Quote Matthew Winn:

wow, thanks for the post, that makes a lot of sense.. (at least in terms of what could be wrong). Thanks. I'll see what irfanview alternatives there are for the Mac..

Or maybe i'll just throw the pics onto my PC.

[Boris Gjenero]

If you know your camera produces correct Exif rotation tags it's a waste of time to rotate manually. Jhead can invoke jpegtran to do the rotation. You could just do "jhead -autorot *.jpg".

[TerranSeven]

Thank you everybody for your help. I have discovered how to correct the problem and will hopefully not experience it any longer.



-original poster.

-Z