Adding photos to for sale items

[SteveH]

Does anyone know how to add photos to for sale items and have them displayed the right way up?

 

[oipigface]

The curious thing is that not all photos are inverted. And turning the original upside down doesn’t help.

 

[PaulR]

TLDR - Open them in MS Paint (assuming Windows  PC), rotate as desired, save a new copy and then upload that.

Some conjecture on why this may be...

I've seen this problem happen for a few people and always assumed it is something to do with the EXIF orientation info stored within the image file.

There are two different ways of rotating an image. If you think of it as an array of pixels with some metadata attached you can either change a flag in the metadata that says the array of pixels should be viewed with a certain rotation applied or you can re-write the array of pixels completely. Using the rotate option on a Windows PC simply changes the orientation metadata. If an application (such as the forum software) is not able to query the rotation metadata (or ignores it) then no amount of rotating on the PC will fix it.

https://jdhao.github.io/2019/07/31/image_rotation_exif_info/

Using an image editing program to rotate and then re-save the image is more likely (depends on the program I assume) to result in the pixels being rewritten rather than simply changing the metadata. MS Paint seems to work for this.

Of course the other question is why is the image upside down in the first place. I can't be sure, but perhaps when taking the shot with a phone held "upside down" in some sense ( @SteveH - are you left handed? Do you use your camera phone with the shutter button on the left? ) the pixel array is actually upside down and the camera adds in the "rotate 180deg" metadata. That would make sense but is just a theory and will probably depend on the phone or camera too. You can certainly get into a slightly confusing situation when using a phone pointing almost vertically down, like you might if photographing something on the floor/ground. Since the orientation of the phone does not imply an up/down orientation of the picture then a relatively small tilt in one direction or the other can be the difference between the image being "upside down" or not as the phone uses its own sensors to figure out which way is up.

[Phil.Taylor]

Paul - thats in accordance with what I've found - there are at least two ways of "rotating" (or not) an image. Even Photoshop will sometimes get it wrong. My favourite go-to free image viewer "Irfanview" always gets it right - been using it for over 20 years! - irfanview.com

Phil.

[oipigface]

Is there not some fix to the forum that would solve the problem?

[SteveH]

4 hours ago, PaulR said:

TLDR - Open them in MS Paint (assuming Windows  PC), rotate as desired, save a new copy and then upload that.

Some conjecture on why this may be...

I've seen this problem happen for a few people and always assumed it is something to do with the EXIF orientation info stored within the image file.

There are two different ways of rotating an image. If you think of it as an array of pixels with some metadata attached you can either change a flag in the metadata that says the array of pixels should be viewed with a certain rotation applied or you can re-write the array of pixels completely. Using the rotate option on a Windows PC simply changes the orientation metadata. If an application (such as the forum software) is not able to query the rotation metadata (or ignores it) then no amount of rotating on the PC will fix it.

https://jdhao.github.io/2019/07/31/image_rotation_exif_info/

Using an image editing program to rotate and then re-save the image is more likely (depends on the program I assume) to result in the pixels being rewritten rather than simply changing the metadata. MS Paint seems to work for this.

Of course the other question is why is the image upside down in the first place. I can't be sure, but perhaps when taking the shot with a phone held "upside down" in some sense ( @SteveH - are you left handed? Do you use your camera phone with the shutter button on the left? ) the pixel array is actually upside down and the camera adds in the "rotate 180deg" metadata. That would make sense but is just a theory and will probably depend on the phone or camera too. You can certainly get into a slightly confusing situation when using a phone pointing almost vertically down, like you might if photographing something on the floor/ground. Since the orientation of the phone does not imply an up/down orientation of the picture then a relatively small tilt in one direction or the other can be the difference between the image being "upside down" or not as the phone uses its own sensors to figure out which way is up.

Opening the file with MS paint and saving again seems to fix the problem. Bit of a pain though. The phone was used in the right orientation so why does the website always invert them? Thanks for the workaround though!