Q: iPhone 4 Photo's & Video Rotating Sideways In Email

Apple sets the jpeg meta tag for orientation when you shoot a photo, so if you hold the iphone upside down, or sideways, etc, the image (which is shot upside down or sideways, since the camera is upside down/sideways) knows it needs to flip/rotate the image when you look at it.

Not all software honors the rotation settings. Gimp (which runs on everything, and is free) does.

You can rotate images and save them, or learn to shoot photos with the iPhone in the correct orientation for non-rotated images. That would be with the home button to the right as you look at the screen.

this really doesnt help the problem the fact is if you take a picture normally in portraight mode and try to email it it shows correctly before you send the email but when the person receives it it turns it sideways

my problem is that when i brought video from my iphone 4 into final cut pro...the video that is shot in portrait mode is jumpy ..the video shot in landscapr mode is smooth...anybody?
john

My wife and I both have this issue as well. So why was this not a problem with my old 3G and my wife's old 3GS?

Yep. I have the same problem. The email draft on the iPhone 4 shows the picture upright -- but everyone gets it sideways. It has nothing to do with whether the recipient has a Mac or a PC. It must be a bug in the iPhone Mail program.

Has anyone gotten a fix or a workaround from Apple?

When people are having issues, and they go to a thread to find a solution, why don't they bother to read the entire thread, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE ANSWER IS IN THE THREAD!!!

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=12482172#12482172

I think I have the answer to why this rotation problem occurs. The Iphone 4 that I have establishes the orientation of the movie when you push the record button. If you push it with the camera in the wrong orientation, then the whole movie will be taken in the orientation that was established WHEN THE RECORD BUTTON WAS PUSHED. The answer I found is that you hold the camera in the orientation you want AS YOU PUSH THE RECORD BUTTON. You do not notice this problem while you take the movie, it is only apparent when you play it back.

I use iPhone 3gs, with OS 4.0.2, and have the same problem.

MMS messages have the correct orientation, but when photos taken in portrait mode are sent in emails, they arrive rotated to landscape mode.

There is no way to correct for this in code, because you can not guess the user's original intentions.

Apple: this is clearly a great oversight on your part, please elevate the priority on this problem.

Sorry, I guess I read your question too quickly. As you suspect, the iPhone uses the orientation flag, which Quicktime recognizes. That's why it works in Quicktime. There are still a lot of applications that don't recognize the orientation flag though, which is why you get the rotation. Those applications usually default to landscape mode in a particular direction, which tends to be landscape with the camera position in the upper left.

The only real options at this point is to either always take photos or videos with the camera in the upper left while holding in landscape, or by setting the orientation explicitly by doing a rotate and resaving the image/video. The other option would be for all programs to utilize the orientation flag, but I'm sure it'll be a while before that happens.

I too have this issue with incorrect rotation; it's so basic and tedious. I buy the idea that certain applications don't read an orientation flag in order to display the correct rotation - but Safari not doing this…?

Boo.

Thank god I am not alone and not the only one annoyed. I recorded this amazing clip for YouTube and it came out flawless first take and its useless. I was hoping to find a fix but does not seem to be one. I guess I have to take the good with the bad. More good then bad.

I have the same issue. I went on a vacation and took many photos with my iPhone running iOS 4.0. When I emailed them to my family and friends, orientation was wrong in several of them -- basically whenever I physically rotated the phone away from its standard orientation, the orientation is wrong. The thumbnails in gmail are correct, but when the image is opened in gmail (even on a Mac), the images are rotated (or even upside down).

This is very annoying.

Like several people wrote, the reason for this is that Apple is now no longer physically rotating the pixels (since iOS 4.0), but instead uses an orientation tag. The actual pixels under iOS 4.0 are in the wrong orientation -- and it is only the orientation tag that can save your viewer from displaying it wrong. Many viewers don't support such a tag, especially under Windows, so the tag gets ignored, and the image displays wrong. The old solution of physically rotating the pixels was actually a lot better!

Apple, consider fixing this. Yes, it may take swallowing your pride and reverting back to the old pre-iOS 4.0 way (which worked perfectly!), but sometimes, this is exactly what it takes.

I took beautiful photos and I am now frustrated that my friends and family cannot view them properly. There is no easy workaround -- half of the pictures I already took are in a wrong orientation and can't be fixed easily. For future images, basically I am stuck with remembering to take pictures in landscape. It is annoying to have such a constraint, on a phone equipped with accelerometers and boasting its smart orientation capabilities..

Apple: or at least provide an option somewhere inside iOS 4.0 to turn the orientation tag usage off. That is, please make it possible to always physically rotate the pixels and not use the tag, for those users that want the iPhone photos to operate in this way. That would be a good compromise solution.

Buy iMovie for $5, and it let's you rotate your video. I fixed my upside down problem like this. From now on I'll hold the button on the right! But iMovie is a good app anyway.