Sideways thumbnails despite upright full size photos???

Question

As a greeter, I regularly see people uploading photos that get turned 1/4, so they appear sideways. I just had that happen as I tried to upload a vertical gravestone photo (5 times, in 5 different ways).

I read the info on photos, which said we should straighten them out on our own computers, then load them. I had already done that, but the fifth time, just in case, I exported it to my desktop and saved it again. 

I STILL got a sideways photo on the edit page and the thumbnail. However, when it finally occurred to me to click the link for the full size photo, that page showed the correctly oriented vertical photo. The others are still sideways. 

What can be done to fix this problem?

Answer 1

I downloaded the image and opened it in GIMP. Before it even displayed it the program told me that "According to the EXIF data, this image is rotated" and asked me if I would like to open it in the rotated orientation or not.

The cause is that the software on your computer that you used to 'straighten out' the image is so-to-speak taking the easy way out and just changing the files metadata so that some software will recognize that it should be displayed rotated - most common web browsers read the exif data from the full version and therefore it displays in the correct orientation, The thumbnail and edit page images are "down-sampled" on the server so that they load faster but the smaller versions neither use nor retain the exif data from the originals.

Comments

Thanks for the explanation, Rob. It makes sense.

Given that, do you have any advice for people who would like to upload vertical images?

With my rudimentary level of computer knowledge, all I can think to do is to take a screenshot of my own photo and upload the screenshot.

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The ideal solution would be for the server-side 'down-sampling' to respect the orientation set in the EXIF data.

Barring that I would suggest using 'real' image manipulation software for changing orientations - typically the problem software is the 'image preview' software comes built into a person's operating system.

I'm neither a Windows nor a Mac user so I'm not sure what image editing software comes built in these days (if any) and what they are capable of, but there are many free options. GIMP is my personal choice but it can be intimidating for some users because it offers so many options and capabilities.

Many software review and tech news sites do annual round-ups of the best software in the photo-editing category. For example The May 2015 list from TechRadar is at this link.