[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[Sean Kelly]

On Sep 26, 2012, at 7:44 AM, Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 25 Sep 2012 18:59:55 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Ugh, yea, exactly. I can't do a normal file copy? I can't email them?
>> The way apple handled photo orientation is just terrible. Like the one
>> guy said in there, at the very *least*, they should have allowed an
>> option to actually store them rotated since there's obviously so damn
>> much that doesn't support that metadata flag.
> 
> I think you can do a normal file copy.  But it seems like many photo viewing applications (Including explorer apparently, which surprises me) does not support the rotation data that your file copy won't look right on those.
> 
> There are probably some applications that support the rotation flag.
> 
> It kind of makes sense to me.  You are getting a raster image from the camera, and obviously the hardware doesn't do the rotation, so to be as efficient as possible, instead of doing a transformation in software, which might also require moving the data to places it doesn't have to go, it simply stores a few bits different in the image.
> 
> From that thread, I could see that Apple is not the first nor only one to do that -- cameras which have accelerometers also do it.

I think you're talking about the EXIF Orientation tag.  Picasa used to use this and other flags so when an image was saved, instead of rewriting the image itself it would attach a bunch of EXIF tags to say how the viewer should display the image.  But enough viewers ignored the flags that Picasa added an "export" option to rewrite the actual image as desired sans tags.  Browsers seem to ignore these tags as well for some reason, so fixing the display of the image may have to happen at the server side or CSS has to be used to tell the browser how to orient the image.  In short, it's kind of a bad situation despite EXIF having been around for ages now.