My photos keep rotating to an incorrect side

hi Tom,
this issue was addressed with the 5.04 update. It is now working correctly, but only for new imports done after the update.
In order to correct the problem for old imports a rebuild of the library must be done.

Try this:
Before doing a rebuild make sure iPhoto's trash bin is emptied. You can do this by control clicking on the trash bin, or from the menu bar under iPhoto.
Close iPhoto
Duplicate the iPhoto Library folder
Drag the duplicate to the desktop (hopefully you have enough room on your hard drive for the duplicate.)
Launch iPhoto holding down the Command and Option keys until you see the rebuild options screen.
Choose the first three options. If you were missing photos in your library, also choose the last option. Be advised that you will get a roll of orphaned photos and it might be quite huge. Most of them will already be in your iPhoto library, but use caution when deleting anything from this roll until you are sure the photos are still in your library in another place. It might be a good idea to share/export this roll of photos just in case you need to import them again.
Back to the rebuild, depending on the size of your library it might take some time. When it is done, hopefully your photos will be there.
You might see some unexpected results as I did when I did a rebuild. Photos had been moved to wrong dates, video clips had lost their duration info and some were even orphaned from the jpg pointer file. It took me some time to straighten it out again.
This is the reason to make a duplicate before you rebuild, in case you do not like the result. If you don't like the result, close iPhoto, then delete the rebuilt library and drag the duplicate back into the Pictures folder making sure the name is iPhoto Library. Launch iPhoto and it should open the library in the Pictures folder.

iPhoto 4 or later: Rebuilding the iPhoto Library

Not exactly, but I did have some very strange rotational behavior on the roll I most recently imported. First, I got the impression it was trying to decide for itself whether or not to rotate, and then sometimes doing so. That is not a confirmed behavior. Second, I would get them rotated correctly, then I would scroll away, or maybe go to another album. When I came back, they would not be rotated anymore...for a moment...but then they would rotate back to the orientation I had earlier specified. Very annoying. Older albums are staying put, rotated or not.

Since it has this delay, I would get impatient and rotate them myself. But that was a mistake, because what I was really doing was an extra rotation, and they'd end up upside.

No, sorry, I have no solution. Neither have I changed any camera settings -- that I know of. It's always worth checking though.

My camera has an auto-rotate feature, so that if I turn the camera vertical to take the picuture, then on review on the camera's little screen it rotates there as well. I'll double-check how it's set.

I experience some rotation problems as well, primarily that the quantities of images I've imported using a card reader (originating in my Canon 20D) don't seem to "take" the rotation when I do a batch rotation. I "wrap" the images, maybe 200-800 at a time, and rotate them as a group. They appear fine in the iPhoto library, but when I copy them to a folder to drag them to the desktop, they appear unrotated. It seems that after a period of time the rotation I did in the iPhoto library will eventually "take" so that copied images appear rotated properly when copied out of the library. But at least for awhile (hours or days after importing and rotating a batch of images) they don't commit to memory as rotated and copied.

I have no solution for this and have quizzed tech support about it, with no good answer so far.

As for other rotation issues, I don't know why the program would rotate images on its own, but the fact that the first post refers to the problem being with newer imports and not older ones is somewhat consistent with my point that imported and rotated image seem to eventually take in the rotated form. Why there would be a lag in this is something I can't explain, but I've been told that the iPhoto library does take some time to process fully. Others have told me it should be almost instantaneous, so I'm not sure what to say about it.

Tim

Kerry or Tim or anyone can help,

Have you found a solution to the iPhoto "auto" rotating problem? My wife and I have been battling this with our new Mac Powerbook. Like Kerry we have the auto-rotate set on our camera so the display rotates the vertical shots.

I believe when we import our photos onto the Mac, we then needed to rotate them for correct orientation. But, as you know, they do not stay that way, at least not all of them. Even rotating them again properly, then putting them into a slideshow, will not work.

I really appreciate any help---I don't know how people are making good use of iPhoto with this bug, if it's indeed a bug.

Thanks,

Tom