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Why Am I Unable to Rotate My Pictures After I Upload Them From My Camera to My Computer

Louis Skrabec wants the angle on photograph orientation:

I downloaded photos from my camera to my Windows PC. I rotated photos taken in portrait orientation 90 degrees using the photo editing characteristic and saved the changes. So created a new shared album in iCloud and uploaded the photos. All portrait photos that I rotated to proper positions are back in mural orientation. What did I do wrong? How do I set them?

Rotation is a surprisingly complicated issue! What you're seeing is a common mismatch between editing and brandish software.

Modern digital cameras and smartphones track the orientation of your device and rotate the preview you lot run across to be the right abroad upwardly, no matter what y'all do. Some devices might only allow 90-degree clockwise and counter-clockwise rotation from what's considered upright, merely any usable smartphone can handle 180 degrees.

But an image sensor always captures the information without regard to orientation: it's just grabbing photons and recording the measurements relative to the physical assortment in which information technology's located. Some cameras can store this as a raw file, unique to each camera brand, that's the generally prefiltered information captured by a sensor. Others can only output in JPEG or another format, or you tin opt to get JPEG and raw or JPEG instead of raw. (Raw is often capitalized as RAW, but information technology's not an initialism.)

If the camera were to produce with information stored in the same orientation every bit you took the picture, except for the single orientation that matches how data comes out of the sensor array, it would need to create a second prototype file into which to map each pixel from one orientation to the other, then delete that original file.

Earlier cameras lacked the computational power to handle this rotation, which was also RAM intensive: The prototype would need to exist rotated earlier the sensor information was converted to a file format that compressed image data, like JPEG. "Lossy" file formats like JPEG utilize approximations via mathematical formats to describe regions of an image; some photographic camera makers' raw formats are lossy likewise. ("Lossless" pinch is less efficient, merely by identifying redundant patterns in a hunk of data, it allows an verbal reproduction of the original data from the compressed file.)

It's possible to rotate JPEGs without adding additional image quality loss if the image resolution divides perfectly into the 8 by 8 or xvi by sixteen grids that a given JPEG algorithm used. Non all cameras had the perfect units years ago, and not all still practise.

Just if a camera (or other software) rotates a JPEG after it's been saved in that format, each decompression, rotation, and recompression progressively ruins the epitome.

The trick that camera makers came upwards with was to avoid rotating pixels and, instead, set a flag in the EXIF metadata that's incorporated in any image their camera exports. The orientation flag has one of eight values, representing each rotation of 0 degrees, 90 degrees, 180 degrees, and 270 degrees, as well every bit mirror flips (flipped top to bottom and left to correct, and clockwise rotated top to bottom and left to right). (Rotations that aren't aren't at correct angles always involves modifying paradigm data to approximate the new angle.)

Eight different orientations tin be represented with a value for the EXIF Orientation tag.
Two images, ane in the aforementioned rotation every bit the image-sensor array in the iPhone and the other rotated, have their Orientation value tagged in EXIF data.

Whatever software that tin display an prototype should be able to read this orientation flag and display a photo in the correct orientation. Besides, any image-editing software, on opening a file and decompressing it (if necessary) to make it editable should besides orient it first.

Even so, image software in Windows prior to Windows 8 couldn't read the orientation flag, and many Mac Bone X apps used to suffer from the aforementioned problem, including iPhoto 4 and earlier versions.

Equally one example, GraphicConverter for OS X has a lot of EXIF rotation options to assist with import and editing.

I'm surprised whatever software Louis is using in 2016 would accept this problem, only it would seem to be a mismatch between whatever it encoded in EXIF and what iCloud read from the upload—iCloud doesn't strip EXIF information.

Unfortunately, iCloud.com doesn't let you edit photos one time they're uploaded. In order to get the right online rotation, you'll need to either use an iOS device or an OS X devices with iCloud Photo Library synced to that drove, or utilise different software to handle the rotation and re-upload.

If yous're handy with the control line, in OS Ten or Windows, you lot tin likewise use the free ExifTool to modify embedded EXIF information in photographs.

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Source: https://www.macworld.com/article/227941/how-to-solve-incorrect-photo-rotation-after-sync-or-upload.html