Photostream Showing up on PC Upside down

corbijnal said:

Set up iCloud and to sync with PC.

Photos sync accross to PC but if I stake a sideways shot with the volume button as the the shutter then it shows up in my PC upside down. (I used to take them the other way around before iOS5 with the volume button facing down).

It shows it the right way up in the camera roll on the phone. Anyone know how to avoid this?

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Same problem here!

You're holding it wrong

I hadnt noticed this, but i did realize that to use the volume button to take a pic, you're holding the phone upside down..

it showed like this on mine in the folder on the PC in the thumbnails, but when i opened them they were fine.

bump... Apple needs to address this problem

marine0816 said:

bump... Apple needs to address this problem

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Is it just your thumbnails on the PC or the actual picture?

If its the actual Picture then it's not really that tasking to rotate as the native picture viewer does it in seconds.

shandyman said:

Is it just your thumbnails on the PC or the actual picture?

If its the actual Picture then it's not really that tasking to rotate as the native picture viewer does it in seconds.

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If you want a quick up load sometimes it's cumbersome to worry about photoshop

marine0816 said:

If you want a quick up load sometimes it's cumbersome to worry about photoshop

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You don't need photoshop. Windows built in picture viewer rotates images, you can open rotate and be done in 3 seconds.

shandyman said:

You don't need photoshop. Windows built in picture viewer rotates images, you can open rotate and be done in 3 seconds.

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What If your fishing and don't have a laptop and you just want a quick upload to Facebook? I don't want to hear people telling me the pictures is upside down..

The point is that it shouldn't have to worry about it

marine0816 said:

The point is that it shouldn't have to worry about it

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This. Got to love the people acting like it's working as designed. The whole point of photostream is meant to be a quick "here's what I just did" slideshow. It's not meant to be for photos you've opened up and tweaked in a photo editor.

For me, I was hoping to use it on my Windows Media Center TV (hooked up to my main TV). I tried to use it for the first time tonight--snapped some sunset pictures while walking my dog, came back to show everyone on the big TV and everything was upside down. I had to laugh thinking this is just another way for Apple to stick it to Windows users. I cannot imagine that this issue didn't come up in-house when Apple was creating the Windows iCloud add-in.

Either way I would appreciate some fix for this, other than "turn on a computer, open up an app and rotate all the photos first". Because if I'm going to all of that trouble I might as well sync the photos to my library, tweak levels, add tags, etc.

Lame.

EDIT: Well, time to eat crow. Apparently this is a Windows issue. The inbuilt JPEG display in Windows (and hence Media Center) doesn't honor the EXIF flag that tells it which way to "soft"-rotate the photo for display purposes. The way most everyone else does it is that the original photograph is not rotated at all--it's left the way it is, but when displaying the photo, the EXIF information is inspected and if the photo was taken in a different orientation then it is rotated immediately prior to being displayed (but the original photo is untouched).

Long story short, this is Microsoft's problem to fix. Still it would behoove Apple to put a support article up explaining this behavior with PhotoStream on Windows rather than just leaving the end-user scratching their head.

this is such an annoying problem

this is not a photo stream problem. I've had many instances where i send a picture that is the correct orientation from my iPhone to a friend with a pc over ichat and he tells me its sideways.

the problem is either in the way windows is reading the meta data or the way the iPhone is writing it.

its not isolated to photo stream

idkmybffjon said:

this is not a photo stream problem. I've had many instances where i send a picture that is the correct orientation from my iPhone to a friend with a pc over ichat and he tells me its sideways.

the problem is either in the way windows is reading the meta data or the way the iPhone is writing it.

its not isolated to photo stream

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Exactly. Plus it is only the thumbnails that showed wrong for me in windows 7, when opening them in any application, native photo viewer, photoshop or uploading to facebook.

Iphone Photos

I think this is an iphone thing. Windows 7 (its picture viewer etc.) often displays the photo the correct way but many other programs don't.

I have solved this problem, I use a camera to take photos

If you take a photo in portrait format the it needs rotating 90clockwise.
If you use it in landscape mode (bottom of phone to your right) then it's ok once on the computer.

To me this suggests that Apple want you to only use landscape mode for photos as almost all new TVx/monitors are 16:9

This is very simple. Whatever is viewing the image is not reading the metadata that apple attaches to it's photos that describes orientation. When you take a photo with your phone the accelerometer can be used to determine the phone's orientation. That info is then embedded in the photo's metadata. It's up to the viewer to read that info and display the image accordingly.

The camera also embeds this rotation data in videos it records.

Well guys, I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that this can be fixed. In scouring the net for solutions to this problem I came across a piece of software called "FastPictureViewer Codec Pack". I was immediately skeptical and wary, because in the past I have messed with "Codec Packs" and had them wreak all sorts of havoc.

But after reading some feedback on various photography forums, this is actually high-quality software and not something thrown together by amateurs. What it's really meant for is to add RAW file support to Windows. MS released their own pack to support RAW, but FastPictureViewer seems to support more RAW formats than the MS pack.

But the gem for us is that there is a replacement JPEG codec in the pack that not only enables display of EXIF data in explorer but also correctly interprets and honors the image rotation data. So it solves this problem for us (at least it did for me).

The bad news is that it's not free. It costs $15 but there's a free trial version you can install and see if it works for you. When you run the installer it gives you a choice as to what components to install. I unchecked most of the other formats since I don't use them. After the reboot all of my upside-down and tilted photos were displaying properly in explorer and media center.

I haven't gotten it working yet on my media center extender but have e-mailed their support folks to see what can be done about that--it is supposed to work so I am optimistic about the prospects.

Hope this doesn't sound like a shill post (I myself am often skeptical when I see reviews on the web) but I have absolutely no connection to this software whatsoever. If anyone finds any other software that can correct this issue for Windows users please post in this thread so we can have some options.

Here's a link to the FastPictureViewer Codec pack. Hope others find it helpful:

http://www.fastpictureviewer.com/codecs/

Photos taken in landscape with volume button at top right corner:

Windows Photo Viewer: upside down
Microsoft Office Picture Manager: upside down
Paint: upside down
QuickTime PictureViewer: upside down
Windows Media Center: upside down
Gimp: upside down with intelligence, see attached

Don't blame Microsoft on this one...

Apple knows how many iPhone users have PCs or Macs - and there's got to be a HUGE number of PC users who own iPhones. Either Apple didn't test this feature on a Windows PC or they knew about the problem and chose not to fix it or address it.

What do you think is more likely? Apple needs to address this.

bookemdano said:

EDIT: Well, time to eat crow. Apparently this is a Windows issue. The inbuilt JPEG display in Windows (and hence Media Center) doesn't honor the EXIF flag that tells it which way to "soft"-rotate the photo for display purposes. <snip>

Long story short, this is Microsoft's problem to fix. Still it would behoove Apple to put a support article up explaining this behavior with PhotoStream on Windows rather than just leaving the end-user scratching their head.

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ericroth said:

Don't blame Microsoft on this one...

Apple knows how many iPhone users have PCs or Macs - and there's got to be a HUGE number of PC users who own iPhones. Either Apple didn't test this feature on a Windows PC or they knew about the problem and chose not to fix it or address it.

What do you think is more likely? Apple needs to address this.

Click to expand...

I'm going to say you're both right and controversially add there isn't a problem to fix. It's a matter of how a particular photo viewer behavies. iOS sets the EXIF Orientation tag. The photo viewing program can choose to use it or ignore it while displaying the photo.

In the case of upside-down photos: When the iPhone takes a photo with the home button to the left (volume buttons on top), iOS marks the photos as "upside-down". This is the part Apple needs to address considering the new shutter button option. It makes sense that if you turn a camera upside down that's how you want your picture, but putting the shutter button where IMHO 99.999999% of the other shutter buttons are on digital camers (sorry lefties!) the photo should not be recorded as "upside-down". Or at least give us the choice to do it or not.

The Windows Photo Viewer does not use the EXIF Orientation tag to auto-rotate pics to always display them "rightside-up". If you take an upside-down picture and it displays upside-down. I consider it a convenience that other programs that do this for you automatically. I would like to be given the choice on how it behaves (rotate them for viewing or not) as you have in the photo editing app IrfanView.

My feature request Apple is that all photos taken in landscape default to "rightside-up" (regardless of whether the shutter button is on top or bottom) and that we have an option to disable that so we can turn the iPhone to get "upside-down" photos. And we get to choose which orientation is "upside-down".

I would like to see Microsoft's Photo Viewer have the option to auto-rotate photos for display, but it can rotate photos on demand so I don't see that feature request seeing the light of day.

my pictures are right side up when posted to facebook.. Apple fixed the problem?

marine0816 said:

my pictures are right side up when posted to facebook.. Apple fixed the problem?

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Facebook now reads EXIF tags correctly.

mactmaster said:

Facebook now reads EXIF tags correctly.

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I thought the problem was with windows thumbnails. My FB never had an issue.