Iphone 4s Takes Pictures Upside-Down???

ios6 doesn't fix the problem. There is a free app you can download and it's called SnapBot. It allows you to take pics through the app and mail them or pull pics from your camera roll and mail them. The downside is it doesn't support video (my vid is upside too) and you can only work with 4 pics at a time. It's a decent bandaid though. This whole upside down photo thing is one huge PITA and the fact that Apple has just chosen to ignore all of us is an even bigger PITA.

You can use Camera + 0.99 it claims to be the best and most popular camera app and more importantly you can take a pic any way you want with the Iphone(even with the home button at the top) and it will come out ok.

How did you fix?

The fact is that this is Apple's problem, not the playback software's. iOS should be using the camera's orientation sensor to encode the frames properly, with the pixels in the upper-left corner of the file corresponding to the pixels displayed in the upper-left corner of the screen. But it doesn't. Instead, it encodes the frame upside-down and then sets a flag to say it's upside-down. So every other vendor on the planet is supposed to add support for this flag, to cater to Apple's inexplicable failure to simply record the frame right-side-up.

That's ridiculous. Apple needs to fix this and record the frames properly. After that, they'd universally display right-side-up on every platform, new and old.

I love how everyone eiter Ignores, or chooses to dismiss this post telling you EXACTLY what's going on. If you choose to remain in the dark, you deserve to keep bumping your knee on the table.

Maybe they won't ignore it this time. I guess we'll have to wait and see...

crh24 wrote:

It is not a bug in the iPhone, it is a bug in the viewing software and there have been several threads about this 'problem' in the last couple of years. The explanation is rather simple.

The EXIF metadata spec contains a field which defines how the image should be rotated for proper viewing, i.e. 'which side is up' 😀

Along about version 3.13 or so of iOS the software was changed to utilize that field of the EXIF spec--likely to facilitate faster photo saves from the camera. Prior to that time iOS devices with cameras physically rotated image data so that the rotation value field of the EXIF metadata could be set to zero. This allowed the images to display properly on those apps that were (and many still are) brain dead, i.e. they ignore the EXIF rotation field assuming it is zero, but that practice greatly increased the image to image time because rotating the image is CPU intensive and is better left to systems with fast CPUs.

So, the problem does not lie within the iPhone, it lies within the other apps that have so far failed to recognize and/or support the EXIF standard properly. Don't complain to Apple, complain to those companies with brain dead software--and there are quite a few still in the dark ages of image presentation. As a previous poster stated even Apple's own Safari doesn't handle it correctly (or at least it didn't earlier this year...I haven't checked lately).

I have suggested to Apple that they provide a switch to enable the old practice of rotating the image prior to saving but that has never happened. If set to ON one could be notified that image to image time would be increased and the user could then decide to use it or not. I suspect it wasn't added because the explanation of the function it provides could be confusing to non-technical users but I have nothing to support that suspicion.

It should also be noted that virtually all high end cameras set the rotation field, they do not rotate the image prior to saving.

This is the post I was Agreeing with. This 'issue' is not one of the iPhone not twisting the pictures, this is an issue with Lazy programmers assuming the Rotation Value of every photo is Zero.

The key question is which way is up, which way you meant to hold the camera to take a picture in landscape and portrait becuase even by apple website you should have the home button to the left to utilize the volume buttons but if you do that it is upside down, and there is no way to take a picture in portrait mode with out coming out wrong..

Thw whole thing is messed up, even sometime you do skype and it comes out wrong why apple have to do such a thing, there whole philosphy is ease of use for consumers yet this problem is not easy...

Its hardly having faster photo saves if you have to rotate them every time..

Solution for now is use camera + that app can take the picture any way you want and it will always come out the correct way .. which is exactly what everyone wants!!

I love how some people think that just because Apple has it technically correct and the rest of the world doesn't that this somehow absolves Apple of any responsibility to its customers. In the Apple world apparently it's OK to implement a standard that means that on 95% of desktops there is a problem. In the rest of the world at least there is a recognition that if you are going to implement such a far reaching standard there's a responsibility to make sure that the world is ready for it. 😕

I am done with Apple. This issue is absolutely ridiculous. There should not have to be a fix. When I bought this phone, it was advertised as the only camera you will ever need. Big Joe Smiley on that one. I had thought about buying an Apple computer but that will not solve the problem either when emailing. All my videos are sideways. Plus, this phone has the worst battery life of any I have ever owned. I have to have a car charger or electric charger with me wherever I go. My contract on this 4S runs out in June and I cannot wait. I for one will be going with an Android as will many if my friends. I feel I have given Apple plenty of time to correct this non problem. I tell everyone, you may see them in all the shows but it's all hype. I have a friend who had an iPhone and now had a Samsung 3 and she said there is no comparison. Said she will never go back to Apple and it is nice to have a phone that does everything it says it can do without any fixes. My husband is also due for a new phone. I told him, anything but Apple.

The key quastion is not "which way is up", and no, Apple cannot tell its customer that there's a right way and a wrong way to orient photos.

Here's the bottom line:

The iPhone is smart enough to figure out which way is up and which is down. We know it does it because it orient the screen and text of apps CORRECTLY whether the volume bottoms are up or down, left or right. It also orients the controls of the cameras apps (the bottun that says 'Options' and the flash on/off button are correct, as well as the front/back camera chooser). And so, it is the phone's failure to write this data into the metadata of the photo. The phone does it correctly between landscape and portrait modes, so we know it's capable.

And for the odd customer that wants a sideways or upside-down photo, Apple should add a button to lock orientation. This is a rare usecase which should take less presidence over the general daily usecase of wanting to snap a photo like a normal camera, with top right button operation.

The top-right design has 75 years of history in camera design, so no one would dare assume that the buttons are on the bottom left. There is a reason behind it: it works for left handed and right handed people and it moves the during a photo snap far less than pressing it crudely with one's thumb upwards at the bottom of the camera.

And with all these excessive and silly new features on the iPhone, when I get an OS update and look at the feature list, I would hope to find really significant changes like this fix instead of some minor bug fixes for those who use Bluetooth with Nike excercise hardware on an iPhone 3GS. What the **** is wrong with Apple? It's turning into Microsoft. Releasing new and exciting half-baked featyres - that doesn't work for me.

OK, I've been following this post for months, the post you agreed with is the first I can recall that actually seemed to technically identify the problem.

But I wanted to test what that poster has said. So I spent $4 on an exif viewer, and took a series of pictures, emailed them to my mac, and looked at the data.

I found an old post that SEEMS to describe how the EXIF orientation tag is supposed to be used.

http://sylvana.net/jpegcrop/exif_orientation.html

The tag is a number from 1 to 8, describing the orientation. The post shows what the letter F would look like with each orientation.

Back to my photos. I took 4, starting with the phone (IPhone 5) in portrait mode, volume on the left, and rotated right 90 degrees for each photo.

1) Volume to the left "portrait", EXIF tag was 6, the letter F would be lying on its left side.

2) Volume on the top "landscape", EXIF tag was 3, the letter F would be upside down.

3) Volume on the right, EXIF tag was 8, the letter F would be lying on its right side.

4) Volume on the bottom, EXIF tag was 1, the letter F would be upright.

Based on this, (and assuming the iPhone or my email (Mac Mail) did not change the EXIF tag, I have to say I think Apple has it WRONG!

What this is saying to me is that when the phone is held with the volume buttons down, it is tagging the photo with a 1, indicating that software does not need to change the orientation. Which is the exact opposite of what I would expect.

All you more technical people, please correct me if I am wrong, but I would assume that if the tag is 1, this is the default orientation of the camera. Can't tell if the portrait mode is correct, because I don't know what the unrotated photo orientation is. Part of me says that with the home button down, that the tag should also be 1, but this assumes that the camera changes the location of the "top/left" pixel when you rotate the camera, which may not be true.

Hope this helps.

One more attempt to simplify: The problem is Apple's. It has two parts:

1. There is no standard for tagging the orientation of VIDEO.

2. Tagging any image is a hack and shouldn't be used.

Think it through: The iPhone KNOWS when it's upside down, so when it writes the image file, all it has to do is reverse the order in which it writes the pixels. Instead of making the first pixel the upper-left one, it should start with the bottom-right one. The resulting image file will be right-side-up, on EVERY device. No tagging necessary. If anyone has questions about this, please ask.

But tagging is not the answer. It's a lame hack that's totally unnecessary today.

To Smokestack and Jimbo435: The word "simplify" came across just fine , its right side up. Apple needs to fix this pronto.......there are 26 pages in this thread alone. It goes back years. But first let's explore some definitions. Tagging is what I used to do to little Susie when we played hide and go seek. Tagging today is what should be installed on Cupertino HQ - upside down. Up high on the parapet, in CAPS. ⱯɹƎƜⱯƆ UƜⱯD RUOʎ XIF ƎLPPⱯ.

or maybe on the "windows," so they see it all day.

All technology aside amigos, if a car manufacturer sends a model out with a defect, they dont say, "the airconditioning only works when the car is in reverse." It's recall time.

Maybe its time for class action? (Read this APPL)

Hi, the only solution is to either hold camera upside down (this does solve both video and photo issue) or download the "Camera+" app, http://campl.us/ which takes far better photos that the normal iphone camera app, and windows recognises them the correct way up...however it only does photos. If you accidentally make a video upside down then you need the quicktime pro software, which will firstly, show it the correct way up and then allow you to resave the video this time correctly.

As for being able to do both video and photos, as the IPhone design intended...no solution likely