Rotating Rotating Rotating
My last camera had a special sensor in it so it could mark the picture it took with Exif metadata indicating the correct orientation. I set my Flickr account to “auto-rotate” the images and everything was groovy, except Windows and the Macintosh screensaver don’t know for EXIF metadata, so some pictures stay sideways when viewed on my computers.
In my new camera, I have to run through my pictures and manually set the rotation before I offload them to my computer. Again, this because the Windows explorer and picture viewer doohickey, which is otherwise pretty neat, doesn’t grok Exif metadata, so if I use Windows to rotate my photos, I will suffer generational loss on my JPEGs.
Anyway, rotating images within the camera is pretty easy, so I just do that before I offload. For Windows, I Googled and found this awesome little utility, that will go through and rotate your images, losslessly, based on the orientation set in the Exif on the camera. You just right-click on an image, or a directory of images, and it will go through and rotate all your pictures just right once and for all!
Well, until you upload the rotated images to Flickr. If you have enabled auto-rotation in Flickr, and auto-rotate your images the right way beforehand, then Flickr will rotate your images again! At least, this happened to me!
So, I turned off Flickr auto-rotate, and from now on, I’ll set my image orientation in the camera before I transfer to Windows, and on Windows, I’ll right-click and auto-rotate before uploading to Flickr.
Of course, this would all be easier if the Windows explorer supported lossless rotation. At least it warns you that it doesn’t when you try to rotate an image. You would think that if they bothered to warn you they could have just stuck a summer intern on the project. Oh well.
