Iphone pictures rotate in weird ways when I transfer to my computer

December 28, 2022 8:32 PM

I have an iPhone 11. I take all my photos the same way, with the phone sideways (landscape), using the volume down button to take the photo. I take lots of photos. When I plug into my laptop (Lenovo T15, Windows 11) and transfer the photos via USB, they end up all sorts of ways--some are sideways, some are upside-down, a few are right-side up, but not many.

In the past, on a previous laptop, the photos would always come out right, but one day they stopped coming out right, and since then they've been all screwy. Is there a setting somewhere that can fix this for me?

posted by Slinga to Technology (5 answers total)

Are you using the Photos app in Windows to transfer these pictures or are you using File Manager? Are you keeping them as HEIC files or converting them to another format?
posted by soelo at 9:27 PM on December 28, 2022

This is a thing that photos taken by iPhones tend to do under some circumstances. When an iphone photo I put onto another system comes out sideways, all I have to do is go back to Photos on my iPhone, select Edit, select the crop/rotate thingy, rotate the photo all the way around, so it comes back to the original orientation, and save. For reasons i don't understand, the photo then stays right-side-up when transferred onto other systems.
posted by metonym at 10:28 PM on December 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

Do you ever rotate the photos on the phone before uploading them? I noticed this kind of weird behavior too recently and although I'm not 100% sure what's going on in my case all the photos affected had been rotated by me on the phone first. I also noticed this because Gimp (the open source photo editor) popped up a window when I opened the photo in the PC saying the file had rotation data, did I want to keep the rotation or revert. So I think the rotation done in the phone gets saved in EXIF data attached to the photos and that might not be respected depending on the app you open them with on the PC?

If you're not rotating them on the phone it may be worth looking at the EXIF data anyway for the wonky photos and seeing if you can either strip it (if it's wrong) or some how "physically" rotate to match it (if it's correct)
posted by okonomichiyaki at 4:51 AM on December 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's Windows' janky EXIF handling. Here's a support forum thread w/a MS answer:

Windows Photo Viewer or Live Photo Gallery does not honor the EXIF orientation info in an image file

That thread is getting kinda old, but it would seem at some the "Import" function (as opposed to manually copying image files) not only mishandled the EXIF rotation, but re-wrote the file (and re-compressed it); so beware of that.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:15 AM on December 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Someone years ago posted a deep-dive on why this happens (5-10 years ago), but I can't find it now --

IIRC the "why" in this case is because when an iPhone takes a photo, it is faster for it to save the photo with EXIF data saying "rotate this image 90 degrees" than it is to save the photo in the correct orientation.

So if you take a picture while holding your phone sideways, when you transfer those images, if the software pays attention to that EXIF data, it'll rotate it correctly. If the software doesn't pay attention to that data, then it will come out incorrect.
posted by matrixclown at 2:55 PM on December 29, 2022