help.
November 11, 2010 6:40 PM

Digital frame arrrrrrrrrrrrrgh filter: We have the HP 1010 digital frame. Vertical pictures keep getting rotated 90 degrees to be horizontal. Help.

Have gone through the (totally skimpy) manual. Tech support is completely useless. They're telling me that the issue is the EXIF data (only they don't know the word), except that shouldn't matter since the pictures are vertically oriented when transferred over and when checked in the thumbnail mode.

Help. What am I missing? How can I get the frame to stop rotating pictures that don't need to be rotated? Is the only alternative to manually crop every photo to being 800 x 600?

Bonus round: how do I get the pan-and-zoom on photos that are too big?
posted by joyceanmachine to Technology (4 answers total)
Maybe your photos are rotated, but the EXIF tag doesn't reflect that. So when the frame sees the tag, it rotates them yet again. So they end up in the wrong orientation. I'm guessing here.. so I'd try to take a look at the EXIF info and see what's up. Are you using any post processing software on your photos?..
posted by aeighty at 10:11 PM on November 11, 2010


There is a setting on my camera that says something like "do you want pictures to be auto-rotated?" I think the default is yes, so when I opened them in Photoshop they were correct but when I uploaded them to a certain website they were not. The website didn't recognize the auto-rotate, probably like your frame. So that website told me that I needed to open the image in Photoshop and save it again (maybe need to name it something different). *OR* just change the setting on your camera. *OR* buy a digital frame that recognizes the same auto-rotate your camera uses.
posted by cda at 7:18 AM on November 12, 2010


Is the only alternative to manually crop every photo to being 800 x 600?

Probably. I have a similar HP frame. After experiments the JPG rotate flag and autofit settings on the frame, I ended up shrinking the portrait image to 600 px high and adding black on the left and right to make it a 800 wide by 600 high image. I got best results by making all photos for the frame 800 wide by 600 high and turning off autofit.
posted by gregoreo at 7:34 AM on November 12, 2010


I think aeighty has it, by and large. I've been monkeying around with the photos, and it looks like the frame is sort of respecting the EXIF orientation data. Photos with my old, ancient camera that don't have any EXIF orientation data tend to get auto-rotated. Photos with the newer cameras tend not to get rotated.

However, it's only "sort of" and "tends". 90% of the photos with my SLR camera turn out properly oriented, but 10% of 'em don't.

My best guess is that the frame looks at EXIF only to see if there is an orientation flag. If the frame doesn't see one, it autorotates. But only if it feels like it. If it sees one, it usually doesn't autorotate, regardless of what the EXIF tag actually says, because I've been looking at photos in an EXIF editor and just randomly sticking orientations in while leaving the photo vertically oriented, and it doesn't seem to matter. But sometimes, it'll rotate! If it feels like it.

Thanks, guys.

For any subsequent reviewers reading this, the frame is great-looking, and pictures look awesome. The firmware, though, is flippin' obnoxious.
posted by joyceanmachine at 9:41 AM on November 12, 2010


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