Automatic Orientation of images

[mrwul]

A dumb, newbie question, I hesitate to ask . . .

It strikes me that often portrait images are displayed landscape. I need to selectively change the rotation.
I have no idea whether there are settings to change the rotation, so photos show up the correct way by default, instead of me changing a lot.

Also, if I change the rotation - will it then 'stick' or will it change back again.
see below.

Thanks.

[xnview]

do you use setting to check EXIF orientation?

[mrwul]

do you use setting to check EXIF orientation?

Ehm...??
Where can I find that?

[xnview]

in Settings>General

[mrwul]

Ah! Overlooked.. sorry. Ahum.

It is tagged.

I can select the images and then use rotate in toolbar, but I wonder why it is not rotated automatically.

[helmut]

- XnView uses the EXIF information of images to get the orientation of images right.
- XnView displays a small info icon when automatic rotation is applied

This is what it looks like if XnView applies automatic orientation:

EXIF-orientation.png (99.13 KiB) Viewed 3006 times

When taking a photo your camera or smart phone writes image data plus EXIF data including the EXIF orientation. If the EXIF orientation is wrong or is missing, then XnView cannot automatically adjust orientation. In your above example I see "Orientation: top-left (1)" in both images even though the bottom image (wine-red oldtimer) is in portrait format. To me it looks as if the EXIF orientation in your images is wrong.

To get the rotation of photos in JPG format right while avoiding lossy recompression I recommend to use "Browser > Tools > JPG lossless transformation > ...". The "Rotate left" / "Rotate right" symbols in the toolbar will also use JPG lossless transformation (given that setting "Use lossless rotation (if possible) in Menu "Tools >> Settings | Category "Browser | Tab "Misc" is activated. This setting is activated by default.)

[mrwul]

Thanks for the above.

Yesterday only, I found out it involves old photos taken with my (also very) old Nikon. All later photos, Canon, Sony and even my Samsung smartphone, the orientation is okay. It seems to have something to do with the internal software of the old Nikon.

Regretfully, the orientation within all the Nikon photos -all- read the same, top left, no matter whether it should have been portrait or not, so it is difficult to filter out the 'wrong' orientation as there is nothing to filter on.

I guess I make up my mind: leave things the way they are, or browse thru roughly 6000 photos, select all that are wrong and adjust them.

[helmut]

Thanks for checking and your reply, mrwul. Older cameras don't have an orientation sensor so they couldn't write anything else than "(1) Top-left into the EXIF data.

.. I guess I make up my mind: leave things the way they are, or browse thru roughly 6000 photos, select all that are wrong and adjust them.

Probably not worth while the effort unless you browse your old images every now and then. In case you decide to rotate the images manually make sure you use the JPG lossless transformations to avoid loss of quality (see above). In XnView browser you can select several images using Ctrl+Mouse click that need rotating and then perform the action on all images - this is a bit quicker than selecting and rotating image by image.

[mrwul]

Super!

I did all the rotation stuff yesterday. Small thumbnails, using 8 rows of 14 thumbnails per screen it went relatively fast.

Thanks a lot.

[helmut]

Thank you for your feedback, mrwul. Good to read that it worked as expected.