iOS4 landscape photos sideways in e-mail

Regardless of what they say is correct on their end, the simple fact remains that with 3.1.3 and prior, you could correctly email photos taken from the iPhone directly to facebook and now after upgrading to iOS4 you can't. Facebook didn't change anything, my mail provider didn't, Apple did. Apple needs to provide a fix.

Benny Hauk wrote:
Regardless of what they say is correct on their end, the simple fact remains that with 3.1.3 and prior, you could correctly email photos taken from the iPhone directly to facebook and now after upgrading to iOS4 you can't. Facebook didn't change anything, my mail provider didn't, Apple did. Apple needs to provide a fix.

Apple doesn't need to provide a fix for there is nothing wrong with their pictures/EXIF data. The viewing programs need to properly respect the orientation flag and some simply do not pay attention to the flag. As I said in a previous post---lazy programming.

Previous to iOS4 the iPhone used the CPU to orient the picture before saving it so that a rotation was not needed on the viewing end. This rotation is CPU intensive and was one of the reasons for the long save times on iPhone cameras. Modern cameras (Canon, Nikon, etc.) do not do this, they save the image in their native format and set the rotation flag based upon how the image should be viewed. With iOS4 Apple merely joined the 'modern' camera world in this respect.

If you wish to know more about the technical aspects of this subject visit:

http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/exif-orientation.html

That link explaining EXIF data was very helpful but I disagree with your premise that Apple doesn't need to "fix" anything on their end.

To the end user functionality on the iPhone is now worse with the upgrade to iOS4 when it worked perfectly under iOS3. If it worked before the upgrade, it should work after the upgrade...

Mazarino wrote:
That link explaining EXIF data was very helpful but I disagree with your premise that Apple doesn't need to "fix" anything on their end.

To the end user functionality on the iPhone is now worse with the upgrade to iOS4 when it worked perfectly under iOS3. If it worked before the upgrade, it should work after the upgrade...

Yeah, and the Apple ][ should still be the computer of choice...but it isn't. The world marches on.

At this rate, I should just be happy to still be able to check emails with my iPhone by the time iOS5 comes around. 🙂

I wonder if one of the causes of this problem is the new rotation lock in iOS4?

The 4.0.1 upgrade did not fix this problem...

To sum things up:

In 3.x, when you emailed a photo to someone, iOS rotated the file itself according to exif data.

In 4.x, iOS does NOT rotate the file. All it does is set exif rotation information.

The "old" way allows the picture to display in programs that do not consult the rotation data, including the IE and Firefox browsers.

The new way means the photo will be displayed with correct rotation ONLY in applications that check for the Exif rotation metadata (including Safari, photoshop, irfanview, etc.)

While what is done now is not "Wrong", the old way was more user-friendly.

The old way is not "wrong" either -- a photo can be rotated losslessly, and the exif data can be set to show the proper rotation (which would be 0).

On 3.x:
Geometry: 600x800 00
Print size: 8.33333x11.1111
Page geometry: 600x800 00
On 4.x:
Geometry: 2048x1536 00
Print size: 28.4444x21.3333
Page geometry: 2048x1536 00

Note that 3.x has Geometry, Print size, and Page geometry set with length shorter than width for portrait images whereas 4.x does not.

OS 3.x didn't make use of the Orientation property at all. However, when Apple decided to fix this in 4.x and did not keep the usage of Geometry, Print size, and Page geometry consistent with 3.x, I would argue that while their new approach is not technically wrong, it does not follow best practices. It is neither progressive enhancement nor graceful degradation.

{quote:title=lkung wrote:}It is neither progressive enhancement nor graceful degradation.{quote}


Agreed

Thanks lkung.

I have had to write to a few developers whose app did not read the rotational data. They fixed this immediately. Some really responsive people out this in MAC land.

You mention Safari as a browser that reads the exit orientation tag, but when I email a photo from my iPhone to Gmail and look at it in Safari the rotation is wrong. Is that gmail or Safari ? Is gmail stripping out the exit so safari can't display the photo as directed by the tag?

I think my spell-check changed exif to exit.

Anyway - someone told me flickr displays the photos wrong but that's not what I'm seeing.

Here are my results:
The Mail app (10.6.5) and Flickr rotate based on the Orientation tag.
Gmail and the built-in photo viewer in XP display the photo without processing the orientation tag.

I have friends and relatives who see the photo upside down or sideways. It is the browser or software that is not reading the EXIF orientation information. I just sent it to myself and Apple Mail rotates the picture correctly. The people who got the upside down picture use Windows and whatever viewer they use does not read the information in the EXIF. I keep telling them to get a MAC but they refuse to even tell me what viewer they are using.... It does display correctly on Flickr.

Truly unbelievable that Apple would create this problem and then not take the trouble to fix it. Makes me feel like an idiot for upgrading from a 3Gs, which worked perfectly, to a 4G which turns its photos on their side. I think it's funny that some of the posters in this thread are such diehard Apple koolaid driners that they maintain that this is not a problem created by Apple.