OT - Displaying Digital Photos in Correct Orientation

[Davidm]

I know it's OT but I've posted this on uk.rec.photo.misc but there doesn't seem to be much activity there, so thought someone here might have some ideas!

On my PC I have a library, organised as a set of structured folders, of about 9000 photos.

Dowloaded straight from the camera, pictures taken in portrait orientation always display in landscape, so I rotate them back to portrait using either my viewer (an old version of ACDSee) or editing program (Corel PaintShop Photo), rename the files to something meaningful then move them into the library. Fine so far, and they display properly (i.e. in the corect orientation) on the PC.

However, I have recently uploaded all the photos to my SkyDrive, mainly as an offsite backup (I also have local backups on external hard drives). I have noticed on SkyDrive that all (I think) of the portrait photos are displaying as landscape. This also happens when I upload them to a media player that I have.

Any idea what's causing this, and how I can rectify it? Is it something in the EXIF info maybe? It's going to be a pain going through all 9000 to identify which ones are displaying incorrectly and then correcting it!

[Scott M]

There's a bit of EXIF data that specifies the orientation the photo was taken in, but it's only relatively recently been supported all over. That you had to rotate them in ACDSee[1] means you were using a version that didn't understand this EXIF value (which the camera was generating originally) so, when you rotated it, it didn't update it. Result: a photo that's got its portrait bit set that's then been physically rotated so when it's displayed the s/w rotates it another 90deg.

Some s/w offers the option of ignoring the rotate value which would keep the backward compatibility.

[1] Sounds like the version I used to use. 4 or so. Got it off a cover disc somewhere.

[Roger Mills]

The problem is caused by the fact that some applications take account of the orientation information in the Exif data, and some don't. If you've manually rotated some photos and want them to stay rotated, you need to get rid of the Exif data. Applications such as IrfanView (free!) have a batch conversion facility which enables you to rename, resize, etc. and which also provides an option as to whether the original Exif data is to be retained. This might be worth experimenting with.