Photos 3: Portrait mode vertical photos rotation bug

I ended up creating a Smart Album, selecting only Portrait Mode photos. (There was no option to also select portrait/vertical oriented photos, that would have saved time.) That limited my selection to only a few thousand photos. I rotated those 4 times, and waited for the progress circle to complete. I quit Photos, relaunched. All photos are now displaying correctly without this problem.

Thank you for your help.

- Adam

I've installed all updates. I tried rebuilding the Photos library (Command-Option on Photos launch). If I use the rotate 90 degrees button 4 times, the problem persists. If I edit a photo & rotate 4 times, I think the problem is resolved. But it's not practical to go through hundreds (thousands?) of Portrait mode photos to fix them this way.

Yes, I just upgraded this machine from MacOS X 10.12 to 10.13. This bug just began with the High Sierra update. I'm not sure what you mean by "folder" photos. If you mean "older" photos, the earliest Portrait photos I have are from Dec 2017 & those show the bug as well.

I tried rebooting in Safe mode, holding the Shift key not only through the reboot process, but continuing to hold it down after logging into my account to make sure no apps would auto boot. Yes, everything runs very slowly in Safe mode! The bug persists in Photos in Safe mode as well.

- Adam

One other note about Safe mode. Since everything runs so slowly in Safe mode, I could actually see what's happening. It looks like Photos struggles to figure out what to do, with vertical Portrait mode images flashing between horizontal & vertical orientation several times before redrawing with the vertical image behind & the smaller horizontal image in the foreground. Different images have this redrawing happen differently, but the result is the same, looking like the above image.

Photos library is on internal 1TB SSD. 31GB available.

I do not use iCloud Photo Library, only My Photo Stream & iCloud Photo Sharing in System Preferences: iCloud: Photos: Options.

If I export the unmodified original, Photos tosses the Portrait mode data & I wind up with an image with no bokeh/depth of field as if I had taken the photo with no Portrait mode. If instead I simply do File: Export: Export 1 Photo, I retain Portrait mode data. The photo exports horizontally oriented, even though I know I took this Portrait mode photo with my iPhone X vertically oriented.

I setup a new User account to test Photos. I brought over my one photo, imported it into Photos in the new test account. I rotated the photo so it was vertically oriented. The photo displays correctly, even across quitting & restarting Photos.

In my main account, I tried hitting the rotate button. On the first press, the image looks stretched. It takes a moment, then the image rotates to a different angle & looks proportionally correct. Hitting the rotate button until the image is "right side up" leaves it looking fine. Choosing a different image, then going back to the one I rotated, the Portrait mode vertical oriented image now looks fine. So I guess I don't need to go into Edit mode to do this. I suppose I could create a script to go through every vertical Portrait mode photo and rotate it 4 times, this just seems like a bug Apple should fix.

For these reasons I seriously doubt this is a hardware problem. This strikes me as a bug in Photos. I'm not having trouble opening other applications, Safari, Mail, Calendar, etc.

My iPad 5 Retina Display is running iOS 11.2.1. My iPhone X is running iOS 11.2.6. So all fairly current versions of OSes.

- Adam

Note Portrait photos in landscape (horizontal) orientation display fine. It's only Portrait photos in vertical orientation that show this bug.