Rotation-Pro question

lynnesite · June 24, 2004

I shot a wedding last weekend and uploaded the proofs into two private galleries. The participants will tell me which ones they want cropped/enhanced for printing, and I'll move those to a new gallery with specific pricing. Yippee, that is what I wanted when choosing a photo hosting site, along with the cropping vs print sizes available that is in work.

But to my dismay, unlike Photoshop which senses the image orientation and automatically rotates a vertical images, Smugmug doesn't--and I'm faced with many many images to manually rotate. Rotation per picture is probably the slowest process I've encountered at Smugmug, even on a T1.

Any plans to sense and autorotate? Any plans to allow selection and bulk rotation per page or per gallery? Now I have to tell the customers to crank their heads, as it would take literally hours to rotate each photo that needs it through smugmug, and a waste of time to rotate proofs without further editing in PS.

Thanks for your attentio or orient me to what I am overlooking?
Lynne

PerezDesignGroup · June 24, 2004

I just wanted to add a suggestion.

Have you considered doing bulk/batch rotations prior to uploading? Photoshop can do this using the File...Automate...Batch tool and there's third party programs (like the Canon's ZoomBrowser) that can pull this off. It could be as simple as selecting the images then walking away while it rotates.

bham · June 24, 2004

Yes I too would like a bulk rotation option. Kinda like the delete bulk, but you could add rotate 90 clockwise, 90 counterclockwise, 180 degrees and then check all that apply for that.

Lynnesite, I learned on that to rotate before uploading. If you have windows XP you can view as thumbnails in a folder and select a group of photos and right click and it gives the option of rotating 90 counter or clockwise. Most of the software that comes with cameras allow bulk rotating pretty easily. I carefully check now after it took so long to rotate with smugmug.

PerezDesignGroup · June 24, 2004

bham wrote:

If you have windows XP you can view as thumbnails in a folder and select a group of photos and right click and it gives the option of rotating 90 counter or clockwise.

Be careful with Windows XP rotation. It doesn't really rotate the photo. It actually creates a hidden file called thumbs.db that tells the browser how to display certain photos. If you were to delete that thumbs.db file, all the pictures would revert back to their original position.

I think bham's 2nd suggestion is the wisest. Third party tools make it a breeze. Just make sure you don't overwrite the original pic with a lower quality one.

I have a feeling Smugmug hasn't implemented this because the amount of server-load would be significant. Especially if there's a bunch to rotate. But that's just a hunch

bham · June 24, 2004

PerezDesignGroup wrote:

Be careful with Windows XP rotation. It doesn't really rotate the photo. It actually creates a hidden file called thumbs.db that tells the browser how to display certain photos. If you were to delete that thumbs.db file, all the pictures would revert back to their original position.

I wasn't aware of this. I usually do this and then open in photoshop for other editing and they open with the proper rotation.

PerezDesignGroup · June 24, 2004

bham wrote:

I wasn't aware of this. I usually do this and then open in photoshop for other editing and they open with the proper rotation.

You know something... I read this a long time ago and believed it true. But now that I looked into it deeper I couldn't find any documentation to support my claims. So disregard my comments. The rotate feature does actually rotate the image. The Thumbs.db hidden file is used to cache the image's thumbnails.

One thing I did learn is that the Windows XP rotate feature might destroy EXIF data when rotating. I need to do some tests with that to see if it's true.

So sorry about that bham. You were on point.

dkapp · June 25, 2004

Another issue...
You want to watch out how and what you are using to rotate the image. You want to make sure the program has loss-less rotation otherwise you will degrade the picture quality. You may not notice it the first time, but with a *.jpg every little bit adds up and before you realize, the file is crap.

Photoshop has loss-less rotation and I believe XP does not.

Dave

Baldy · June 25, 2004

dkapp wrote:

Photoshop has loss-less rotation and I believe XP does not.

That's correct, and unfortunately lossless rotation is CPU intensive.

smugmug uses lossless rotation too and PerezDesignGroup's guess was right: the reason we didn't institute bulk rotation is because it is so CPU intensive. The same servers that process the images for bulk uploads (resizing, where we use the most CPU-intensive algorithm we know of to preserve detail) also do rotations. For awhile we occassionally got sacked on Sunday nights when several people would do big batches of >10 megapixel uploads simultaneously.

But we've designed more efficiency into the processing now and thrown more hardware at it to keep up, so adding bulk rotation is absolutely on our list. It's currently around 5th priority or so, but we talk about it all the time and plan it.

Thanks,
Baldy
(from smugmug)

lynnesite · June 25, 2004

Baldy wrote:

That's correct, and unfortunately lossless rotation is CPU intensive.
But we've designed more efficiency into the processing now and thrown more hardware at it to keep up, so adding bulk rotation is absolutely on our list. It's currently around 5th priority or so, but we talk about it all the time and plan it.

Thanks,
Baldy
(from smugmug)

Thanks, Baldy, that sounds great that it is at least on the list. In the near future I will batch rotate the ones that need it in PS before uploading. I appreciate all you are doing and truthfully, the optimal print size calc for a selected image is way more important to me. Most of my customers are not aspect-ratio savvy.

I'm thinking of captioning with filename and some sort of aspect ratio hint so that people can pick the right sizes per image in the meantime. Like 9x12 vs 8x10. Anyone have a better idea?

Lynne

cocokola · December 19, 2005

I too am *very* intersted in this feature. The ability to follow exif informaiton should be available. You could limit this ability to the thumbnails to reduce load on your systems inimplement this much-needed feature.

It's been 1.5 years, any updates on status?

bwg · December 19, 2005

cocokola wrote:

I too am *very* intersted in this feature. The ability to follow exif informaiton should be available. You could limit this ability to the thumbnails to reduce load on your systems inimplement this much-needed feature.

It's been 1.5 years, any updates on status?

you talking about the auto-rotate or the bulk rotate?

the bulk rotate has been around for quite a while. go into a gallery and it's under photo tools > rotate photos

cocokola · December 19, 2005

bigwebguy wrote:

you talking about the auto-rotate or the bulk rotate?

the bulk rotate has been around for quite a while. go into a gallery and it's under photo tools > rotate photos

yes, that's what I have to use currently, I'm speaking to the ability of smugmug to auto-rotate based on exif information so i don't have to click on thousands of photos and select rotate.

Nimai · May 14, 2006

I found this thread while looking for the same feature. Something one might call "auto-rotate"- rotate using the EXIF data as Photoshop does after loading.

Well, I found this thread, and now, as a previous poster asked- any updates?

Thank you!

dmc · May 15, 2006

when I "acquire" my images off my memory card, my ACDSee automatically rotates em for me... I remember the days of selecting all the pictures needing rotate to the right, and using tools to rotate, then all the ones that need to go to the left... etc. Glad those days are gone!

The thing I am not sure about is when ACDSee is rotating it for me, does it change the orientation info in the Exif? I don't' want my pics rotated again if Smugmug "Auto rotated" during upload.

Ben · May 15, 2006

dmc wrote:

The thing I am not sure about is when ACDSee is rotating it for me, does it change the orientation info in the Exif? I don't' want my pics rotated again if Smugmug "Auto rotated" during upload.

I am glad someone mentioned this, as I was just about to. I don't know for sure with ACDSee, but a bunch of image editing programs don't resave the orientation information in the EXIF data. So if you save the photo in those programs, it would then automatically rotate the wrong way if we did it.

It is something we have kept our eye on, and mused about possible solutions... but we have been focused on bigger fish.

Nimai · May 15, 2006

Ben wrote:

if you save the photo in those programs, it would then automatically rotate the wrong way if we did it.

Since different folk's workflows might result in different results, I wouldn't want it to be automatic.
But, in the Rotate Photos tool, there could be a button that auto-selected photos based on their EXIF rotation (for example). Then for people who do need their photos rotated, they could quickly select them, and proceed as usual.

Baldy · May 15, 2006

Oh, brother. The post I wrote earlier in this thread was mostly wrong. Here's the deal:

Almost every image editing program had the issue in some past release of not updating the EXIF after rotation. If we were to auto-rotate images, it would be great for most consumers who just upload their images straight from the camera. The fear is that we'll receive photos from pros who rotated them already, we won't be able to tell, and we'll rotate them again.

If someone knows whether this is really an issue, or whether it was just an issue in past years, let us know.

Ric Grupe · May 15, 2006

Ben wrote:

I am glad someone mentioned this, as I was just about to. I don't know for sure with ACDSee, but a bunch of image editing programs don't resave the orientation information in the EXIF data.

Such as ???

ms9 · January 13, 2007

lossless rotation in XP
i've been doing some research into this whole photo rotate issue as i got scared reading some of the postings here. so i'm going to post related stuff i've found out.

so i've also done rotates in XP using Window Picture and Fax Viewer. all along, i never thought it had been changing the original image file, but now i just realized that it does. but it doesn't even update the "Modified Date" as showed in Properties on a right-click! so bad, and all this time that is all i had been looking at. after a closer look, i can see filesize varying a tad on a rotate. but it's ok, as it seems the rotate is lossless as long as image height and width are both multiples of 16, which my images are. i should also say that this is true of at least the current version of XP anyway. i'm not sure how much this program has been updated over time, and some of the posts in this thread go a couple of years back. also, i didn't seem to lose EXIF data on XP rotates, or at least the fields visible on a Windows right-click in Properties seem fine anyway.

and for rotating in PhotoShop it would also be lossless, but you have to make sure to re-save the resulting file in the proper jpg setting (which may be hard to determine sometimes?). otherwise, you may make the file unnecessarily bigger or on the other hand, lossy.

so my method for SmugMug here is to rotate my images in XP before uploading them. i find the XP rotate to be relatively fast.

PaulSpot · May 22, 2007

Auto rotate in rotate tool
I just wanted to toss in my agreement that if you afraid of "over rotating" peoples' photos at upload time because they have have already rotated them in other software (w/out updating exif info), then having an "auto rotate based on exif info but named better" button in the bulk rotate tool would be PERFECT.
It's annoying/time consuming to do this even in the bulk tool because so many images are hard to see when they are thumbnails, and half need to go one way while the other half go the other way. There didn't used to be that many cameras storing rotation info, only the high end ones, but now cheapo consumer cameras like mine are doing it pretty regularly. I just got a Canon SD800 IS for $300 on amazon and it does this, so I'm betting lots of people are in this boat?
Maybe it's not as easy as I'm making it out to be

bobmorane · June 11, 2007

PaulSpot wrote:

then having an "auto rotate based on exif info but named better" button in the bulk rotate tool would be PERFECT

+1 ! that would be great !
i'm so tired manually rotating uploaded pictures !

Andy · June 11, 2007

bobmorane wrote:

+1 ! that would be great !
i'm so tired manually rotating uploaded pictures !

Hi, see post #17 in this thread
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=309058&postcount=17

Thanks!

rainforest1155 · June 11, 2007

Baldy wrote:

Almost every image editing program had the issue in some past release of not updating the EXIF after rotation.

The software I use resets the tag properly (Irfanview, IMatch mostly). Maybe it's possible to let the user choose in the control panel if they want to enable this feature and then they're responsible that their software does it right. After all they can still turn it off again.

Sebastian

PaulSpot · June 12, 2007

Andy wrote:

Hi, see post #17 in this thread
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=309058&postcount=17

Thanks!

right; we were just saying that if you are nervous about automatically rotating them because you can't tell whether they may have already been rotated once, having a "autorotate all these now" button in the bulk rotation tool would allow you to still do it all at once. This avoids the potential problems because the user knows whether he has already rotated his photos; certainly nobody would ever rotate them, then try to rotate them again and be surprised at the results! If you use a piece of software to rotate your photos then you know they're all set, and won't have a need to try to rotate them again... best of both worlds?

Ben · June 12, 2007

rainforest1155 wrote:

The software I use resets the tag properly (Irfanview, IMatch mostly). Maybe it's possible to let the user choose in the control panel if they want to enable this feature and then they're responsible that their software does it right. After all they can still turn it off again.

Sebastian

Irfanview is actually one of the ones that caused problems for a long, long time. I don't recall when they fixed the issue, but it was within the last year-ish.

6 months to a year ago, I went through every image editing program I could get my hands on, and every "recent" version of them, and tested it out. For example, since you mentioned it, the version of Irfanview I had on my machine already didn't do it properly, but when I upgraded it did handle it properly.

I don't have those results on the machine I was posting from, but I remember that there was still a few programs that were mainstream enough and recent enough that it would cause some problems. But the tide has definitely shifted in the right direction since we had last really dug into the issue.

I will have to run the tests again now and see, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that the impact caused at this point in time wouldn't be nearly as bad as if we had done it a year ago.

This is a good issue to keep bringing up (within reason!

), as it is something that is in the process of changing for the better. I will see about figuring out where we are now, and decide how to proceed.

Our interfaces are so feature-rich and complex already, we REALLY REALLY hate to add any more toggle options or anything along those lines that would either get lost or be confusing. We would much rather just have it do it automatically if the vast majority (well over 90%) of our customers would receive a beneficial or neutral impact.

PaulSpot · June 12, 2007

Welp, it's certainly hard to argue with keeping things simple to use!

Rotation-Pro question

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