Iphone 4s Takes Pictures Upside-Down???

Guys, this is a defect. The only way Apple is even going to consider it (or reconsider it, since they know about it) is if you file a report here.

Select "bug report" as the type of issue, and then tell Apple you want the iPhone camera to encode pictures right-side-up instead of tagging them with an orientation. There's no excuse for tagging the image with a flag that can be ignored or messed up by thousands of applications. The phone knows which way it's facing at the moment you take the picture. Therefore, the image should be generated right-side-up with no tagging necessary.

Hi Alpha,

The reason is that Gmail is now (after many complaints) paying attention to the rotation metadata in the photo, and rotating it as it shows you. However, if you send multiple photos from your phone and do "view all" in gmail, then they will be sideways/upside down again.

I believe windows 7 doesn't look at the metadata either, so it shows up sideways there until you manually rotate it.

Apple no longer saves photos in a pre-rotated state (like they used to in iOS3). This means that each viewing application must pay attention to the photo metadata and rotate it on the fly in order for you to view it correctly.

The frustration is that it will just depend on what device/computer/OS/app you use to view the photo, and you will see different results everywhere.

More info here: http://rydama.com/2012/05/02/why-is-my-picture-sideways/

Hope this helps,

Ryan

I understand that. But why when I have rotated it correctly and saved it so it opens up correctly, THEN post it to Facebook does it show up either upside down or on the side?

I'm not sure. How are you rotating and saving it? In windows 7 photo viewer?

Apple uses some settings that don't work with other devices. If you rotate the pic it won't fix the issue. Here is the best solution I have found.

For New Pics: When taking pictures/video the home button should either be on the right (for landscape pictures) or bottom (for portrait).

Existing pics: If you have lots of pics use Google Picasa...

1) Install picasa and go to your folder which contains such pictures

2) Click any one picture in your folder and then do a Ctrl+A to select all the pictures in that folder

3) Do a Ctrl+S

This won't work on video though. But sites like YouTube have started accepting the apple settings for video so it's not a big issue.

Stoke, thanks for the link. I've taken your advice and submitted a "Bug Report". Hopefully it will help but after 30 pages of complaints here and Apple still totally silent on the issue like it doesn't even exist I'm not very optimistic.

For those who are interested in an app that's TOTALLY FREE and fixes the problem of upside down / sideways photos when mailing outside of the Apple world I'd recommend Snapbot which can be found in the App store. I've been using it for over a year now with no problems whatsoever. The down side is that you can only mail 4 pics at a time with the App and it does not handle videos. Very simple and straightforward to use though.

This thread is a bit dated... but I had to comment as I was really surprised as to how many people think this is an issue with the phone.

This is actually a known bug in Windows. Windows does not properly read the orientation meta tags in the photos. The issue is fixed in Windows 8, but all previous versions of Windows have this bug.

Windows 8 has finally been updated to read these meta tags, so as people upgrade, they won't have this problem anymore. However, any users of OSX or any version of Linux won't have this problem... those operating systems have always read the tags correctly. The bug is specific for Windows.

So... all that said... everyone should NOT be submitting bug reports to Apple. The bug reports should be submitted to Microsoft, requesting that this fix be included in older versions of Windows, not just Windows 8.

Actually, what "this problem" is, is in question. There's definitely a problem with iphone photos and Windows, but there's also a problem for some with the iphone camera itself. There's a question what the "right side up" is with landscape pictures; on my phone, the words will shift around to be upright no matter which way the camera is held, making it hard to tell if the pic will be upside down in the photo album stored on the phone and in iPhoto on my Mac. (And people are divided on which way is upright--home button on left, or home button on right?). And even with portrait pictures, sometimes my phone will take upside-down photos with the home button on the bottom. In short, I think there is more than one problem here.

charlie74 wrote:

This is actually a known bug in Windows. Windows does not properly read the orientation meta tags in the photos.

No. There shouldn't BE orientation meta tags. The phone knows its orientation when the picture is taken, therefore it should lay out the image bitmap properly in the first place. Did you read the thread?

So... all that said... everyone should NOT be submitting bug reports to Apple. The bug reports should be submitted to Microsoft, requesting that this fix be included in older versions of Windows, not just Windows 8.

Yes you should be submitting reports to Apple. There are thousands of photo apps on all platforms, not written by Microsoft. You're saying that every one of them should implement a workaround for Apple's bug, and cater to its metatag hack? That's ridiculous. There's one foolproof solution that fixes the problem for everyone and all software, past and present: Encode the image right-side-up.

Stokestack wrote:

No. There shouldn't BE orientation meta tags. The phone knows its orientation when the picture is taken, therefore it should lay out the image bitmap properly in the first place. Did you read the thread?

I suppose whether or not there should be orientation meta tags is a different discussion. The Exchangeable image file format defines these meta tags. They were not invented by Apple. The meta tags include

information that varies with each image such as orientation (rotation), aperture, shutter speed, focal length, metering mode, and ISO speed information.

It is up to the software vendors to make sure that they handle the tags correctly. This is why Microsoft has already fixed the issue in Windows 8. It does not have the orientation issue that older versions of Windows have.

Several models of Android phones have the same issue when downloading the pictures to Windows. Those phones have all also correctly implemented the meta tags. This is not a problem specific to Apple phones. A quick search on the internet for "Android takes photos upside down" will show that people using the Galaxy S phones, among others, have this same problem.

This problem is not exclusive to Microsoft, its defiantley a problem with Apple, let me put it this way, i often sit there with my kids and use the fron camera to make some videos. everytime i export they are always 90 to the left the only thing that you can use to view correctly is Quicktime all other programs whether on a mac or windows plays them 90 degrees to the left.

So my question is this, who is doing it wrong Apple or the 100's of other software vendors/web sites who produce media players?

I have no confidence in Apple being correct when one of there selling points was that you can use the volume buttons to take a picture which pressumes that Apple way of being correct is the home button being on the left but which we all know means that ALL photos and videos come out upside down!!!

How hard would it be just to have a setting to enable the camera to take it upright whatever way you held the camera.

Is it not bad enought that you take a video in portrait mode and when you upload to youtube then is big black lines either side of the video!!!!

Is it not bad enought that you take a video in portrait mode and when you upload to youtube then is big black lines either side of the video!!!!

Wait, what? That's a different problem. You have the phone turned the wrong way (vertically) for video. The shape of the sensor is a RECTANGLE. What do you expect Apple to do in this situation? Of course there are "black lines", because you've just shot a door-shaped video clip!

Apple's mistake in this case is not showing the video sideways while you're shooting if you're holding the phone in the wrong orientation, to remind you that you're doing it wrong.

Im not photographer or cinematic man so maybe cannot but why dont they make the sensor square so its the same on both orientation, who wants to see a video with massive black lines either side

who wants to see a video with massive black lines either side

Is this a joke? A video frame is a horizontal RECTANGLE. If the video image were square, you'd still have massive "black lines" on each side. You need to think this through.

I found a "work around" on another discussion board. If you use the crop feature, you don't have to actually crop the picture... just slide the frame in and out then save the photo. It will email and upload correctly.(tested on an iphone 4s with ios7)