Vista can't rotate some JPEGs

December 21, 2008 11:55 AM

I have a bunch of photos I've taken over the years on my laptop running Vista Home Premium. I recently found out I can't rotate them.

-In thumbnails and Windows Photo Gallery, the pictures show up sideways, as I originally took them. When I try to use Photo Gallery to rotate them, it says that "An error is preventing Photo Gallery from saving this picture".
-The files are not read-only, but there's a good chance I rotated them right-way-up when they were on my old Mac last year, so that may have done something to the files.
-In MS Paint, they aren't even recognized as JPEGs, even though Paint loads other JPEGs just fine.
-In Irfanview, however, they're shown right-side up.

I know I could use Irfanview to load, rotate, and save each photo individually, but that sounds like a real pain given the number of photos involved. What I'd really like to do is find out why Irfanview sees them right-side-up as opposed to all other programs, and what I can do fix my JPEGs so they can be rotated/edited/saved by Photo Gallery and other programs.

posted by dunkadunc to computers & internet (4 comments total)

I believe irfanview has a batch conversion options, go to the file menu, or press "B" (not ctrl-b just the letter) and it should bring up the batch conversion dialog.

On the upper right there is a section that says batch conversion settings. Click the checkbox for advanced settings, click the advanced button, set the rotation you want, go back to the main batch dialog, select your folder and click start batch.
posted by gryftir at 12:20 PM on December 21, 2008

Could be that there's a problem with the permissions on your picture files. Try right-clicking one of your picture folders or files, then looking at the Security tab. Select your username from the list and see what permissions you have; if you don't have write permissions, that could explain the problem.
posted by sinfony at 12:36 PM on December 21, 2008

I tried sinfony's suggestion but it says I have full ownership and control.
The fact that Irfanview sees the images as right-way-up leads me to think that the Mac rotates an image by adding some metadata to the JPEG, which Irfanview can see but most other programs can't.
posted by dunkadunc at 12:47 PM on December 21, 2008

I think that it is most likely that Windows Vista is sulking because you edited these photos on a Mac. You need an application that will edit the EXIF orientation bit in your JPEG metadata. It looks like EXIFeditor will do the trick.
posted by Susurration at 1:59 PM on December 21, 2008