Auto-rotating puzzle?

jeromedg

Hi all,
I'm new to SmugMug and so far I like it!
My only issue is that after downloading 15,000+ pics, I see that some of them have been auto-rotated while they shouldn't have been. None should have been for that matter.
FYI, I have both old (~year 2000) and new ones and I don't see a clear pattern yet as to why some were rotated and some weren't.
I'm using Star*Explorer to do the massive upload.

I'm also an avid Perl programmer, and I've played around with the SmugMug Perl module to create albums, categories and sub-categories.

What I would like to know is how I can detect which pics were wrongfully rotated and so that I can instruct (programmatically) SmugMug to rotate them properly.
If anyone out there can think of a heuristic, it would be greatly appreciated!

Please advise.

Thanks!

darryl

jeromedg wrote:

Hi all,
I'm new to SmugMug and so far I like it!
My only issue is that after downloading 15,000+ pics, I see that some of them have been auto-rotated while they shouldn't have been. None should have been for that matter.
FYI, I have both old (~year 2000) and new ones and I don't see a clear pattern yet as to why some were rotated and some weren't.
I'm using Star*Explorer to do the massive upload.

I'm also an avid Perl programmer, and I've played around with the SmugMug Perl module to create albums, categories and sub-categories.

What I would like to know is how I can detect which pics were wrongfully rotated and so that I can instruct (programmatically) SmugMug to rotate them properly.
If anyone out there can think of a heuristic, it would be greatly appreciated!

Please advise.

Thanks!

I presume you meant to write that you *up*-loaded 15,000+ photos, right?

Hrm, it's odd that photos are getting wrongly rotated. I *think* SmugMug should only be auto-rotating images for which it finds an Orientation EXIF tag that is not set to 1. (http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/exif-orientation.html)

My guess is that maybe you post-processed your images with software that rotated the images, but then didn't reset the Orientation tag back to 1?

Here's a thread that talks about this problem with Paintshop Pro:
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=110201&page=2

jeromedg

It looks like you are probably right...
But the problem is that the EXIF orientation is no longer available in the image once it has been uploaded in SmugMug and is also not available as part of the "Photo Info".
That's really a bummer b/c I'm really not excited about having to go thru 15,000+ pics to find out which ones are mis-rotated and rotate them back to how they were before on my PC.

I guess I could write a Perl application that would read the original pic file from my hard-drive and based on its EXIF orientation tag, programmatically un-rotate the associated pic in SmugMug.

I must say that this comes as a disappointment... :

darryl wrote:

I presume you meant to write that you *up*-loaded 15,000+ photos, right?

Hrm, it's odd that photos are getting wrongly rotated. I *think* SmugMug should only be auto-rotating images for which it finds an Orientation EXIF tag that is not set to 1. (http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/exif-orientation.html)

My guess is that maybe you post-processed your images with software that rotated the images, but then didn't reset the Orientation tag back to 1?

Here's a thread that talks about this problem with Paintshop Pro:
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=110201&page=2

jeromedg

Ok, I didn't really find a way to fix the problem in the future but for now I wrote a small Perl app that fixed the problem with all the existing mis-rotated pics.
If you care to know how, the app reads the EXIF info of all the pics I have on my hard drive that I recently uploaded to SM. From the EXIF data I was able to determine which of the pics had been wrongly rotated. It then downloaded all the images info (not the images themselves) from SM. It then mapped the pics to rotate (and how to rotate them: 90 or 270 degres) with their associated imageID in SM.
It was then fairly easy to issue a images_rotate API call to rotate the 1350 mis-rotated pics.
And Voila !

jeromedg wrote:

It looks like you are probably right...
But the problem is that the EXIF orientation is no longer available in the image once it has been uploaded in SmugMug and is also not available as part of the "Photo Info".
That's really a bummer b/c I'm really not excited about having to go thru 15,000+ pics to find out which ones are mis-rotated and rotate them back to how they were before on my PC.

I guess I could write a Perl application that would read the original pic file from my hard-drive and based on its EXIF orientation tag, programmatically un-rotate the associated pic in SmugMug.

I must say that this comes as a disappointment... :