Photo orientation wrong when synched back to iPhone

It's not rotated. It's just relative. The PC always puts photos shown in the format they expect for a photo. Horizontal, with long axis horizontal. ONLY after rotating on a PC, do they show up in the other orientation.

When a photo is placed on the computer, the computer has no idea what the orientation was, for the camera. Take a Nikon and turn the camera 90 degress and you will see the same thing.

The PC will assume every photo placed on it is orientated as it expects, with the horzontal axis the long axis. It has no way of knowing if the camera was rotated or not, just the same as with a Nikon. It just so happens that most digital cameras have the long axis already on the horizontal. If you turn the iPhone and take the photo, like you would with every other camera, they come in just like any other digital. The way the iPhone is designed, it's as though you had a digital and turned it 90 degress.

Bottomline: There is no flaw or bug here. It's all relative to how the photo was originally taken and the PC has no way to know that.

Can't say what happens on a Mac. Never owned one and never will. I can say that on a PC, the photos are sync'd back to the phone in the same orientation they came in on. I haven't tried rotating them on the PC, so I don't know what they do if rotated and sync'd back. Did you rotate your photos on the Mac, to get them in the orientation they are in? If not, it's odd that a PC to iPhone can do what a Mac and iPhone can't. 🙂

Can't say what happens on a Mac. Never owned one and never will. I can say that on a PC, the photos are sync'd back to the phone in the same orientation they came in on. I haven't tried rotating them on the PC, so I don't know what they do if rotated and sync'd back. Did you rotate your photos on the Mac, to get them in the orientation they are in? If not, it's odd that a PC to iPhone can do what a Mac and iPhone can't. 🙂

There is definitely something wrong (and MikeIPS' explanation that "there is no bug or flaw here" doesn't hold water, there are flags for orientation and they are being mistranslated somewhere in the process)...

1. With iPhone in vertical position I took a picture of a vertical letter size print and it appears vertical on iPhone when viewing.
2. Imported this picture into iPhoto, it appears vertical. Quit iPhoto and opened in Preview it appears vertical.
3. Deleted original from iPhone, dragged imported version from iPhoto folder into my "sync pictures" folder and exported back to iPhone, now it's rotated 90 on the iPhone.
4. Since I never edited or saved photo in either iPhoto or Preview, then it seems likely that the orientation flag is being changed during sync either upon upload or download.
5. Next in Preview I selected image in imported version and copied and pasted into new photo in Preview, uploaded newly created file to iPhone and it is still rotated.
6. Throughout this process, when doing a "Get Info" in Preview, the Orientation flag(s) shows 6. If you "Save As" in Preview to PNG it completely strips orientation info and PNG file uploads with correct vertical orientation. If you "Save As" TIFF it changes the orientation flag to a 1 and it uploads with correct vertical orientation. I stopped at this point because I wasn't doing an exhaustive analysis and only wanted to fix orientation on this one photo.

I should note that the weird orientation has only happened a few times, which lends further credence to the theory that it is happening during transfer. I rarely move photos back and forth, so this isn't a huge issue to me. If I did use this feature extensively, I would use the Automator and create an action that took the batch and in Preview resaved them in a file format that was as nondestructive to the image as possible. Until Apple fixes this issue, at least with the information I have provided you, you have a way to resolve the issue without resorting to having to buy any third party apps.

p.s. If this ever happens to MikeIPS I would suggest he used the Automator as well, but since Vista doesn't have one, it wouldn't do him any good.

allanster wrote:
(and MikeIPS' explanation that "there is no bug or flaw here" doesn't hold water, there are flags for orientation and they are being mistranslated somewhere in the process)...

Agreed. There's a problem here. Another option I've seen suggested is to open each photo you hope to send to your (in my case, iPod Touch) in Photoshop, rotate it 90 degrees, then rotate it back, and save it. Then export. For whatever reason, this then enables the iPod to display the image in its proper orientation. Forget that an image downloaded directly from my XTi displays correctly in Finder, Photoshop, and GraphicConverter without any such machinations.

Yes, I am frustrated as well with orientation on the iPhone. I just upgraded from a iPhone 1 to an iPhone 3G. I sync'ed about 1,000 photos from iPhoto to my iPhone. The iPhone is ignoring the photo orientation rotations that have been done in iPhoto when the photos are sync'ed to the iPhone 3G. I do not want to go in and manually re-set the orientation on all these photos on the iPhone. I did NOT have this orientation problem on my original iPhone.....strange.

I am having the same issue. Yesterday my phone 4g had developed some dead spots on the touch screen. Could not send a text and could not select certain items, scrolling was poor. I have seen this issue in some other threads.

Although it was a month out of warranty Apple replaced it at the gennius bar with no questions asked.

I saved all my pictures to 2 different computers my laptop and desktop. I brought them in with Image Capture and just stuck them in a folder. When opened in either Preview or Photoshop they open in the proper orientation.

When I went to put them back in my repalcement phone they are all sideways. I tried re-syncing from each computer and they both did the same thing. For me it is about 300 pics. To re save them all would be a PITA. Just seems so odd.

Any more suggestions would be a help.

Some of the pictures I have stay in the proper vertical orientation, while others magically change to horizontal.

I find it interesting that you say you will never own an apple computer.

yeah this is definitely a bug. i'm having this same exact problem. ***.

I'm having the same problem too. I have tried using Photoshop to rotate and unrotate the images to no avail.

Very frustrating.

Having same problem with some pictures synced that have the appropriate EXIF orientation tag. Basically when they get "converted" to iPhone during sync the iTunes is throwing away all the EXIF orientation info. This is a bug, or I'm doing something wrong?

I've been having the same problem for months. I was hoping that iTunes 8 or the iPhone 2.1 update would fix this. Seems there should be an easy way to solve it.

I am having the same problem; my iPhone always displays portrait photos in landscape. Apparently, Image Capture doesn't like portrait photos, so it always saves them as landscape and just applies an EXIF tag saying "rotate this." Unfortunately, it's a double-whammy because iTunes refuses to read the EXIF data when syncing back to the phone, so it stays as Image Capture saved it: landscape.

It seems odd to me that this bug hasn't been fixed, because it seems like it would affect anyone who has ever taken a portrait photo on his or her iPhone, and I'm willing to bet that's quite a few people.

I synched 184 vacation photos to my phone, realized they were not orientated correctly. I deleted them off my phone. I then went into bridge and automatically did the rotate feature without having to actually open the file. It saved them all out fine, opened fine in the right orientation etc. Then I re-synched and those photos were all back to the wrong orientation again. Annoying to have to spin a phone around like a baton to show people pictures. This must have something to do with the ORIGINAL Exif data. Would be nice to see a fix here!