When emailing as photo or video it sometimes shows upside down or sideways. How do I fix that?

Question

When emailing as photo or video it sometimes shows upside down or sideways. How do I fix that?

How to take and send a video and pictures that are not sideways or upside down when they are opened by email.

iPhone 3GS

Posted on Sep 26, 2011 8:30 PM

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Answer 1

kewllewk

Level 1

4 points

Nov 3, 2011 1:39 PM in response to MikeOtown

More like NOT EXACTLY @MikeOtown.

So here is a little more information and it still has to do with Apple missing something in iOS5 and the EXIF encoding when they introduced the volume shutter release function.

I ran a new test as follows. I took 4 consecutive pictures of the same subject, a piece of paper with the word test on it.

First image - landscape with volume button on the top using volume button
Second image - landscape with volume button on the bottom and using the volumen button
Third image - landscape with volume button on the top using the on-screen shutter release
Fourth image - landscape with volume button on the bottom using the on-screen shutter release

I sent all 4 images from the iPhone in one email. (Yes you can do that now in iOS5) to an Exchange Server hosted email account that connects to my Mac running outlook and also to a gmail account.

Results:

Outlook (Exchange Server) on MBP 15" running Lion 10.7.2. The images all arrived right side up in the email. I saved them to the desktop. Viewing them from the desktop in Finder, they are all right side up. Using Preview they are all right side up. Opening with Photoshop they are all rightside up.
Gmail (Viewed in Safari and Firefox). In the email the thumbnails all appeared right side up. Clicking on view images 1 and 3 appeared upside down in the viewer. Downloading all the images to the Mac and viewing them in preview etc. they were all rightside up.
Gmail (viewed in Outlook) on MBP. The images all arrived right side up in the email. I saved them to the desktop. Viewing them from the desktop in Finder, they are all right side up. Using Preview they are all right side up. Opening with Photoshop they are all rightside up. Saving all the images to the Mac and viewing them in preview they were all rightside up.
Outlook (Exchange Server) on PC. Images 1 and 3 arrived upside down.
Gmail (Viewed in IE). Images 1 and 3 arrived upside down.

The issue arises when the volume button is located on the top of the iPhone and again does not seem to be apparent natively on a Mac or iOS platform that I am running.

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Answer 2

JRob_MN

Level 1

19 points

Oct 5, 2011 1:29 PM in response to Vincent Xu

iOS5 won't help; in fact, it may be worse, since the previous solution was "take landscape pictures with the home button to the right", and using the volume button as a shutter means that the home button will be to the left.

Due to orientation information stored in the picture's EXIF data, the phone will always know how to orient the pictures -- but, alas, Windows doesn't appear to be able to use that data.

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Answer 3

KellyLS

Level 1

4 points

Oct 25, 2011 1:14 PM in response to johnfromangleton

Since using the iPhone 4S the pictures I take from it appear fine on the phone but when I email them they appear upside down to the people and I send them to and on my home computer. This was never a problem on my iPhone 3GS so I want to stop anyone who is about to respond saying there is no issue. There clearly is something different and I can prove it. What ever Apple changed or added has made it to where picture orientation is incorrect when viewed on any device other then the phone. Does anyone know if Apple is addressing this issue or are they just ignoring it?

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Answer 4

kewllewk

Level 1

4 points

Nov 3, 2011 10:56 AM in response to johnfromangleton

This only seems to be an issue when using the volume button as a shutter release and when the images are viewed on Windows based PC's. If you use the on-screen shutter release on the iPhone this issue does not occur. So, when Apple added the voume shutter release functionality in iOS5 they missed something in the encoding of the EXIF data.

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Answer 5

Nov 4, 2011 5:05 AM in response to kewllewk

Good testing.

For #2, why is Safari ignoring the Exif data in the image?

Gmail is sending Safari html like this...

<html><title>photo.JPG - Gmail</title><body><img src=/mail/?attid=0.1&disp=emb&view=att&th=1336...28></body></html>

Volume buttons up is how apple shows pictures being taken in their commercials.

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Answer 6

kewllewk

Level 1

4 points

Nov 4, 2011 7:53 AM in response to MikeOtown

@MikeOtown that is a good question. I don't think that it is Safari explicitly ignoring the EXIF data in the image in #2. Because when you download the photos the photos appear rightside up. Somehow it has to do with the data transfer from Gmail into the viewer and the handling of the EXIF image data in the same manner that a Windows based machine handles the file.

I think Apple made a slight oversight with this issue and hadn't tested it all the way through. In my opinion they probably reversed the code for the volume shutter release which should be on the top like normal cameras and like they show in their advertising. It is simply working backwards. In the previous versions the accelerometers were used to indicate image orientation which worked pretty well. Not perfectly but good enough if you paid attention. Today with iOS5 you can edit the images on the phone and rotate them which would make a nice quick fix for those photos where you hadn't allowed the accelerometer to properly orientate for the camera position. However, with the addition of the volume shutter release Apple muffed up the code to relative to the volume shutter release button. I would have to assume that this should be a simple fix by switching a couple of line sof code, but what do I know. :-)

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