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second test
- Thread starter Catzzzmeow
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Lol! YOUR not nuts - I fixed the issue, It will not fix the others, but from now on should be fine. Thanks Patti, should be working fine now - I hope!
It was an EXIF rotation issue - a bit complicated, I added some code on the back end that "fixes" this issue, I hope! Good so far!
Orientation Sensors and the Exif Orientation Tag
Some camera manufacturers wanted to solve the problem with portrait photos and thus integrated orientation sensors into their products. If the sensor detects that the camera is held in a portrait orientation, the image would automatically be rotated so that this doesn’t have to be done manually later on.
However, there was a small technical problem: The image signal processing chips (ISPs) in the cameras were simply not able to encode images in a rotated manner. If the ISPs were able to generate rotated JPEG files directly, the problem of portrait images would have been solved once and for all in the best possible manner. But we don’t live in that kind of perfect world.
Since doing it the right way was out of the question, the camera manufacturers chose what they thought was the next best thing: Writing a flag into the metadata of the JPEG file that records in which orientation the photo has been taken. The natural choice for this was the Orientation field in the Exif data. Exif is the industry standard for metadata in files generated by digital cameras. It is based on the old TIFF image format, but slightly modified so it can be embedded into JPEG files (among others). The Orientation field itself isn’t an Exif invention either: It was already part of the TIFF specification for years, it simply was not very commonly used. With Exif though, it finally came into the spotlight.
The result of this metadata trickery is that portrait photos are written as JPEG files where the image data itself is stored in the wrong orientation, but a field in a metadata block contains information how the image has to be rotated to restore the proper orientation. What could possibly go wrong…?
Rotation confusion
The main problem with this scheme is that is ambiguous: While applications with full Exif support will show the photos as intended, Applications that just care about the image data and ignore all optional metadata will show the photos in a rotated fashion.
Back when the first cameras with orientation sensors appeared, almost no existing software was able to interpret the Exif Orientation Tag. The situation has improved since, but there are still many programs in existence that don’t care about Exif data.