Thumbnail and actual photo orientation out of sync

Perhaps your camera has an auto-rotate feature that somehow conflicts with iPhoto?

am having the same problem. I imported my kids photos from old 3.5 floppies, and this problem is happening with the ones that were taken portrait. the landscape ones (the ones that don't have to be rotated) are fine. When I rotate the ones to portrait, then play the slideshow, they play unrotated. the orientation of the thumbnails at the top of the edit screen is different than the larger picture in edit view.

I'm having the same problem, as well. It seems to have started when I downloaded the latest update to IPhoto. Before that, photos that rotated when I downloaded from the camera were rotated correctly in the slideshow. Now, even though the photos are in correct orientation in the thumbnails, they are sideways in the slideshow (both old and new photos). Maybe this needs to be addressed in the next update?

David Yutzy
I imported some images from a photo. CD to my Pictures folder. A couple of then were wrongly oriented in the Preview thumbnail but when double-clicked (in Preview) they opened correctly!! So I imported them "as is" into iPhoto OK, they show properly without needing to rotate them.
I copied the same images from my Pictures folder to my Panther iBook and this time all the Preview thumbnails werre correctly oriented. Again they imported and viewed correctly in iPhoto without the need to rotate.
So perhaps there is a bug in one of my versions of Preview? (They are 2.1.0 and 3.0) The moral is (maybe) to take Preview's thoughts with a grain of salt!

David,

Preview does not actually rotate the source file. It just adds a tag that tells Preview how to display the photo. In contrast, iPhoto copies then physically rotates the file, then places that rotated version in its Modified folder. The unrotated version is kept unchanged, as are all files, in the Originals folder.

Bottom line, rotating in Preview prior to importing into iPhoto will result in the file remaining unrotated in iPhoto.