Iphone 4s Takes Pictures Upside-Down???

Hey there Stokestack!

Thanks for the suggestion. There is a suggested Lossless JPEG Rotation fix suggestion for Mac - it is called Cheese and it is freeware by Stuffware.co.uk.

I will report back on the "fix".

tried this, still a problem, rotate, looks ok in cheese, finder, but picasa has it upside down. I can't win!!

Actually, it does take extra time to save the picture with "correct orientation", if the phone is not in default orientation (ie: portrait with the home button at the bottom).

No matter which way you're holding the phone, the processor receives a burst of data from the sensor in a set order, which is the raw picture data in upright portrait orientation. This data stream then gets saved to flash on the fly without taking the extra CPU time to rotate. This is what is meant by "saving the pixels in the correct order" - instead of sequential memory reads (which are very fast), the memory locations need to be read in a particular order, and the algorithm used to calculate this order is the CPU-intensive part of the process. Instead, Apple just records the orientation of the phone at the time the photo was taken, and encodes this into the the EXIF data.

Apple used to rotate on the fly in earlier versions of iOS, but then made a decision not to, because the higher resolution of the cameras in later model iPhones meant that it took longer and longer to rotate the image data before saving. So, Apple changed the camera app to stop rotating during save, and use EXIF rotation instead.

This is why, unlike earlier iOS incarnations, you can now just repeatedly click the "shutter" button, and take repeated photos in quick succession - something you couldn't do anywhere near as rapidly before.

So, my point stands (and I'll add an extra possibility here) - Apple should either set an option to rotate on-the-fly when sending, or allow the option to turn back on the old rotate-on-save functionality, as suggested by Stokestack (at the expense of rapid-fire photos).

Either option (or preferably both!) would make users a lot happier than they are currently.

-U

Interesting info; I didn't know past iOS versions stored the bitmaps right-side-up.

And a reasonable analysis too, however one step is missing: the sensor readout isn't just written to memory; it has to be deBayered first (even if sensor data were captured raw temporarily, deBayering has to happen at some point). It is during this step that one would expect equivalent performance no matter the order in which you stepped through the pixels.

I'm sure there are ASICs to do much of this processing, and after well over a decade of cameras with orientation sensors, we should reasonably expect those ASICs to have orientation-sensor inputs to control the order in which they process pixels.

Couldn't agree more - there are various methods that could be reasonably employed to make this problem go away, and regardless of the technical reasons why the problem occurs, this doesn't negate the fact that it's definitely causing headaches for iPhone users. Unlike "Antennagate" and Maps, I guess this one just hasn't received enough exposure for Apple to do something about it yet...

Why did this discussion get highjacked from the original question--what is wrong with the phone when it flips the pics internally?--on the phone itself?--not when you e-mail, etc.? It's frustrating bc there are a million discussions on the Internet about the latter problem, and anyone with the former has to sort thru hundreds of replies to what was not the original question to find info that might actually have related to it. So, one asks again, what's wrong with the phone when you don't have to do anything extra for the pics to be upside down on tha camera roll of *the phone itself*? Portrait pics taken with home button down, landscape taken with the home button on the right? Thanks.

Hello lettuce2 - I'm not sure if you are asking rhetorical questions or being cynical, further I might be misinterpreting your comments completely, so forgive me if I am - however it was the Apple engineers who included the ability to use the '+' volume button as another means to take a photo, so unless you hold the phone different to most (I assume not) then this 'feature' means that one would typically hold the phone with the volume buttons upper-most i.e. the top right, which would mean that the Home buttom is on the left when looking at the screen.

Therefore, it is reasonable for one to deduce that if this was an intended Apple engineering improvement and one takes a photo holding the phone in the intended way to use the '+' button and the photo is acutally taken upside-down, only noticable when exported and viewed on a PC (I think the photos are the rightway up on a Macintosh), then I would say that something just isn't quite right somewhere.

It is this that is the crux of our issue and the subject matter of this discussion.

Kind regards,

Smuff

Thanks, Smuff,

Sorry to seem impatient. Your advice that the shutter is now meant to be operated primarily by the volume button by right-handed people helps (I thought that was optional, and I find it ergonomically annoying because I mostly take pics with one hand and my hold on the camera is less stable when I use the volume button). I think the OP's problem, however, was that s/he was shooting portrait pictures with the home button down, and the pictures were appearing in his/her camera roll upside down, which indicates a problem in the phone, no? (accelerometer?) This interests me b/c my 4s camera has been acting wack for a few months now. It might be that I'm holding it upside-down in landscape mode, but this would not explain why *sometimes* it shoots correctly when the home button is on the right and sometimes it does so when the home button is on the left (when I was trying intentionally to take upside-down pics to have them end up correct). And tonight I found myself indeed shooting portrait pics with the home button on the top because when I held the camera upright the pics were showing upside down in my camera roll. This, fyi, is before uploading (and I'm not even a windows user--I upload to iPhoto on a Macbook Air). So I was looking for a discussion of this weirdness with the phone independent of Windows upload, etc., and I can't find anything b/c every discussion is flooded with comments about the uploading problem. Thanks again.

I had realized that I don't think Apple is going to fix this issue with the 4s. I learned that if I hold my phone upside down where the "+" button is on the bottom I use my right thumb to take the shot.. I use Mac but every time I sent photos to my boss etc.. On a pc. The photos/video would be upside down. This way with the button on the bottom using my right thumb I have had no problems and I can send the photos from my phone to a pc user without issue or manipulating/orienting it right side up. Is this the way it should be.? No. But I love my iPhone and its the only fault that bugs me...

I understand, but for a multi-billion company I think that this is quite a bit of an oversite in my opinion especially since this issue wasn't in the iPhone 4/3GS/.. and just cannot see how this could've happened. I will leave it up to all those PC users to draw their own conclusions as to why this issue is yet to be resolved.

Regards,

Smuff

Yeah that's the same response I got before for offering a work around, it works when you flip over. It's been years they've moved on.... And leaving it up to pc users is fine but when it's my bosses or clients. I should just turn it over. Besides my company issue BB. Is far far far more cumbersome camera is horrible... Apple thinks they are right in what they did but it doesn't help in the field. Flip it over it works PC and Mac. Enjoy

"Flip it over" doesn't work, because there's no indication of which way is "correct" to begin with.

If Apple isn't going to fix this defect, then they should show the image upside-down on the screen when you have the phone turned the "wrong" way.

And this isn't just the 4S. If afflicts the 4 and probably the 5, if not all of them.

Hi,

1st time iPod Touch 5th gen user here. I finally traded in my broken iPod Mini for a new iPod Touch. One of the specific things I wanted to use this touch for is taking pictures as I pointed out to the Genius who helped us select the 64Gb touch model. Wife and I over the last few years have gone through several point and shoot cameras that seem to fail after only a few months in one way or another and so we were tired of it all and decided to go a different direction. Took the iPod Touch out for the first time on vacation this past week only to discover all our pictures and videos of the kids are upside down. I understand there seems to be a proper way to orient the camera after googling the issue however, 1. We are both south paws so naturally we want to orient the touch the other way 2. My wife has a capacitance touch issue where touch screens don't work with her fingers. Even the trackpad on the laptop she has troubles with and so most often will use an external mouse. It was awesome that we could use the volume buttons to snap pictures but now to our dismay we have a huge job ahead of us to re-orientate all our pictures and videos. 😟 I have to say I'm pretty disappointed and expect more of Apple for their "Premium Products" at Premium Prices. The bigger disappointment is the genius sales guy that I specifially talked to about taking pictures with the device did not warn me about this issue. Not sure what I'm going to do. Try to get the wife to use the snap button on the bottom from now on or return it and go back to another point and shoot camera. 3 un-happy faces for you Apple! 😟 😟 😟

I'm having the same issue with my 4S. I can rotate and save the pic so that it opens up correctly, but when I then try to post it on Facebook, it always shows up upside down, even though it appears to be saved right side up. This seems to have just started with me though; it wasn't like this before. Mine will take the pic right side up but if I email it , then it inverts, and even if you rotate and save it, it won't post it correctly. I know I can just post it straight from my phone but there are times when I want to email the pic back and post it from my computer. Very frustrating. I am using Windows 7 btw ...but this problem just started happening for me.

A little more curious info. When I email the pics to myself from the phone and look at them 'preview' mode in Firefox ...they are rotated incorrectly. But when I look at them in Gmail, they appear right side up. But after that once I download them to the computer with either, they become inverted. Weird that they look right with Google Gmail but then get inverted when I download them.