Reply To: Dog Photos

[jesse mcclure]

That’s one of the remaining big limitations of our photo uploads – or at least that is the generous way of phrasing it. Really this is a problem with certain mobile devices. So far I’ve only seen this problem with photos coming from a certain popular brand of electronics.

The digital information in a photo is saved in a specific orientation which corresponds to the physical camera hardware. But many mobile devices can be held in many orientations, and thanks to their accelerometer (or similar hardware) they can store some meta-data with the image essentially noting that “the camera was upside down when this was taken”. In reality the meta data is just an orientation or rotation, but that’s what it’s meant to convey.

That way when you view that image in an image program on your computer, the image program can see that note and rotate the image before it displays it. This is all done with a (nearly) universally aggreed upon meta data called [EXIF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchangeable_image_file_format). Our image handling now properly orients any image that has embeded EXIF metadata saying how it should be displayed.

Unfortunately one manufacturer has decided that they don’t want to play nicely with the rest of the digital world, so they don’t use the same notation for image orientation that the rest of the world does. If you take a photo with one of their devices, it may only display properly oriented on other devices from that same manufacturer. Sometimes image viewers not from that manufacturer do jump through extra hoops to placate the eccentricities of this one tech company – but that is not always trivial to do.

So in short, images uploaded to our site will be properly oriented if they follow the (essentially) universal standard notation of keeping track of image orientation. If they do it differently, though, you will need to rotate them before uploading. Or, on a case-by-case basis, I am able to rotate them for you if you let me know it’s needed.

**EDIT:** Dan, I’ve rotated your two dogs’ images, so they should be set for now.