Keep in mind that displaying the photo according to its EXIF tag is an *option* in irfanview. Make sure that you activated that option before assuming it's not making use of the tag.

It opens fine for me in irfanview, probably because I enabled that option.

Aaah, thanks - didn't know about that option in Irfanview.

-Zeke

EDIT: Well I think we're left at option 4: go have a taco and a beer and worry about something more fun.

You're going to love this one.

It appearead at first as though this might be my solution. If I drag my example portrait photo (the one I attached earlier in this thread) into Photoshop Album 3.2, it seems to detect the exif rotation correctly and display it correctly on the screen.

Now, Album 3.2 doesn't let me synch directly to the ipod. But iTunes does detect the presence of PhotoShop Album and it says "hey, there's a photo in the Photoshop Album. Do you want to sync it?" and if I say yes, it wipes out all the other pictures on the ipod in favor of what's in my photoshop album, and synchs the correct photos from the photoshop album to the player. So far so good.

But when I view the pic on the ipod, it's sideways. Just like it would have been if I'd only used itunes by itself.

How about that? I used adobe's album-making software, which is specifically supported by apple for exactly this purpose, and synched based on that software, and they still got it wrong.

Now you guys can't get on my case for using this thing in a way it wasn't intended. And I can now say with much more conviction that this whole thing sucks big green drippy donkey balls.

Actually, we can. Your still doing all of this on Windows... :-P

*runs and hides*

So you think that the Mac version of iTunes would magically interpret the Exif data, when the Windows version doesn't?

While my poke was more of a joke, doing some testing shows some interesting things.

I just downloaded your attachment above, and preview opened it properly. Finder also shows the dimensions as 1536x2048. So while iTunes won't magically interpret the EXIF data, it looks like the underlying OS does. Now, if I tell iTunes to sync your photo out of a folder to my iPhone, it still shows up wrong. However, if I import that photo into iPhoto and sync it, the iPhone shows it properly oriented, and I never touched a rotate option inside iPhoto.

OS X has a lot of built in photo stuff at the OS level, including RAW support for the major vendors. It doesn't surprise me too much to see EXIF rotation data handled seamlessly, but it does surprise me that the handling didn't migrate to the iPhone/iPod touch OS X.

If you do a Google search, you'll find a number of complaints about Apple not interpreting EXIF data properly in a number of instances, unfortunately.

Yes, I'd expect that. If iPhoto is interpreting the Exif data, and it also has a synch-to-iPhone option built in (instead of needing to run iTunes separately like us windows folks do), then yeah, I could see how it would be able to handle that transparently.

It's too bad the "Adobe Albums" thing didn't work in terms of rotation. Because it seemed like it would solve my other problem quite nicely. It would let me drag any photos I liked into albums, while leaving the original photo files alone. Adding the extra step of running iTunes to perform the final synch wouldn't have been a big deal.

Nope. iPhoto doesn't talk to the iPhone for sending photos to the device. iTunes still does the sync to the device, it just reads the iPhoto albums list and uses some iLife API to pull everything over. My guess is that API is responsible for handing over the image rotated properly, based on the fact that iTunes even on a Mac reading photos out of a folder doesn't rotate properly.

(using the tfabris post count increase method)

Don't you still have a Mac around somewhere? Any particular reason you aren't using it as the iPod syncing machine? Being that you aren't using the iPod for music, it could be useful to just have a separate machine to sync to it for podcasts and such. Thats all I use my iPhone for on the media side, lots of Twit content and other podcasts, while the Karma is still my portable music player. The iTunes/iPod sync stuff for podcasts is pretty nice.

Yes, I've got a mac mini still. It's connected to my TV, and it isn't the machine with all my pictures on it. I will see if iPhoto will let me synch the photos from my desktop machine in the basement across the network.

Question about using iPhoto as you suggest...

If I use iPhoto on the Mini to organize albums based on photos on the network fileshare, will it insist on writing back changes to those files, or will it clutter that remote directory with database/cache files and folders? Or will it leave the original files alone and keep its dirty little database and cache to itself?

Well, think of iPhoto and it's "dirty database" like the empeg. Your going to open iPhoto, drag in your folders of photos, and it's going to import them locally, into it's own directory structure and naming scheme, and create the database. The files on your desktop will not be touched, and won't even be referenced again.

There is another way too if you don't want the Mini storing copies. Open iPhoto, and go to Preferences. Untick "Copy items to the iPhoto Library" under Advanced, and iPhoto will just make links to all the files on your desktop computer. If you edit a photo in iPhoto, it leaves the original alone, and saves the edited copy locally inside the library. Move a file on the remote system, and the link will break, so keep that in mind. Database and cache files are all still kept on the Mac.

That sounds like ideal behavior. I'm going to give it a shot. Thanks!

Oh, you're gonna REALLY love this one.

iPhoto works well for the generalized task of arranging some albums for going onto the iPod. I could drag the desired photos from my file share into iPhoto on the Mac, and they all showed up correctly, with iPhoto correctly interpreting the EXIF data and every single photo appeared in its correct orientation.

As you said, it leaves the source photos and folders clean, making its own database on the mac. Great, so far so good. I'm thinking this is going to be a good solution.

So I did this for several of my photo folders, a total of 345 pictures. Then went into iTunes on the Mac and hit "sync" and off it went. Cruised along, synched all the photos, then I look at the photos on the iPod and........

They are random. Only about half of the portrait photos are in proper orientation. The other half are sideways as I illustrated earlier in this thread.

Hm. Perhaps it's just as I feared and it's not interpreting the EXIF data at all, and the ones that are coming up correctly are ones that I'd somehow managed to pre-process and I don't remember doing it.

So I find some adjacent photos on the iPod, where some of them are in the correct orientation and the others are in the wrong orientation. And I look at the files back at the source on the PC.

*NONE* of the photos were preprocessed. All of them are identical, all of them were untouched original source photos. The EXIF "orientation" field is the same for all of them.

Just to prove it, I am attaching a ZIP file of two of the photos. On the iPod, one of these photos displays in the correct orientation, the other displays sideways. 484 displays correctly, 496 displays sideways.

Note that both of the photos display correctly in iPhoto on the Mac.

Also note that it's not an intermittency problem with the orientation sensor in the iPod; The photos that are wrong on the iPod are *ALWAYS* wrong, and the photos that are right on the iPod are *ALWAYS* right. I can spin and twist the iPod every which way and it does all the expected rotations of the images. It's just that the "bad" ones are always in exactly the wrong orientation, exactly as if the EXIF data had been ignored.

Can anyone see a difference in the two files zipped up here that might cause them to be interpreted differently by iPhoto/iTunes?

Also: "Random" is too strong of a word. They are in clustered groups. A couple dozen correct, a couple dozen wrong, then a couple dozen correct again. (not exact counts, I'm just giving a feel for how big the clusters are.) The two that I zipped up are from the edge of a cluster.

You know, you could just stop wasting your time with all of that b0rken software and instead just auto-rotate (lossless) the JPG image data with any of a handful of free, open source programs.

Cheers

The two you zipped up showed up properly for me on my iPhone. I downloaded the zip, clicked and dragged the folder into iPhoto 08, and told iTunes to sync the new album it made of the folder. This is on Leopard as well, and iPhoto set to copy files into its own library.

Tony didn't say if he did the copy-the-photo option or the reference-the-photo option. I wonder if he did the latter and when iTunes went to sync them, it grabbed the original photos without prejudice.

All this said, it does make sense to just freaking rotate the photos.

I don't know the difference? How do you tell with iPhoto?

I did the following:

- Ran iPhoto on the Mac.
- On the mac, opened the network share of \\monkeybrains\c$ (my desktop PC in the basement).
- Dragged folders from the share onto iPhoto.
- iPhoto now has libraries of my photos.
- Closed iPhoto.
- Ran iTunes on the mac and said sync photos from the iPhoto libraries.

So which is that? Copy the photo or reference the photo?



I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO.

As I just demonstrated, SOMETIMES the software gets it right. Now I want to figure out why and make it get it right all the time.

There's also the whole thing about where I'm the kind of guy who likes digging away at a good bug repro to find out exactly what causes it. There's something academically fascinating about this. Why does it work for everyone else and not for me?

But besides that, I don't want to batch-rotate my entire photo collection because there's some stuff in there that I don't want messed with at all. I don't want the original files touched in any way. For instance, the folders are full of scattered special sub-folders where I'm doing things like panorama stitches or stereo pairs, where an altered rotation will break it. I don't want to (and shouldn't have to) filter through all of those folders to separate out the stuff I don't want rotated. Yes, I know in the time I've messed with this I could have simply *done* that, but then there's the whole academic thing.

Also, what OS X version and iLife version do you have?

No argument.

The problem is that once you dig through all of this, you're going to find that the problem is that the software is broken. And since it's not open-source, you're not going to be able to do anything about it, except, maybe file a bug report. But you could do that now. And then you're left with photos that still don't display properly. To which the only thing to do is either wait for Apple to fix it or rotate them yourself.

If you're really inclined to pursue it, though, here's what I'd do:

Find two photos, one of which works right, one of which doesn't. Verify that what happens to each photo does so consistently, even through separate uploads of the same file. Then strip the exif headers and create new, ultra-simple ones. Try again. My bet is that something in one of the exif headers is confusing the Apple software.

I don't know, it's just whatever gets given to me through the latest internet updates after I bought the iMac. I always apply those patches. Anyway, it's all at home and I'm at work...

iPhoto gave me an *AD* for iLife, but didn't offer to actually upgrade iPhoto that came with the Mini. It said I had to buy iLife to get the upgrade. So I don't have iLife, I've got whatever the latest iPhoto is that comes with the PowerPC Mac Minis, plus the online updates.

Yeah, that sounds like a good diagnostic step.

iLife is the name for iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie and some other stuff depending on version. If you have iPhoto, you have iLife of some version. The ad was likely for a newer version, so thats an indicator you have 06 at the newest.

And some reason your response is making me think of "Do you see a big blue E, or a big green N? Big black nothing? Ok..." :-)

Okay, so I have to *buy* iLife 08 to see if it fixes the exif rotation?

Hm. Seen at Apple's site:

"Apple - Support - Downloads - iPhoto 6.0.6

This update to iPhoto addresses issues associated with EXIF data compatibility and Photocasting."

I'll see what the exact version is when I get home. Interesting.

[q] doesn't work any more. I changed all three of your [q]'d posts to [quote]s.

I assumed Tom would get around to fixing that soon enough, so left them.

It's not like [quote]s will get broken.