photo orientation oddities

[rans6andrew]

Me wife is helping some youngsters with their maths by doing lessons over Zoom. To make this work She uses a graphics tablet and loads in example and practice question papers in .jpg format. She presents them using Openboard and can edit and add to the original document as they work on the problems. If the question papers are taken from one of several on-line resources and loaded into Openboard the orientation is preserved and the top of the pages appears at the top of the screen. If She takes a photo of a paper sample sheet using her mobile phone and loads this into the Openboard it can come in any road up, ie top doesn't necessarily appear at the top. We thought we could open the photo using a windows photo editor and rotate the image to sort out the orientation before saving back to the PC. NO!!! It doesn't fix it.............

What is going on?

Rans6............................

[jolihokistix]

After taking an iPhone photo, you need to edit it (in any small way) and save it.
That incidentally fixes the orientation.

[MechEngr]

Probably the phone is held nearly horizontally - it uses an accelerometer to determine "up" and when horizontal slight angles are being measured. Try putting it vertical on a wall and see if that is better.

[Specaircrew]

Sounds like a portrait/landscape faff. How are the pictures displayed when they’re saved on the phone?

[Jhieminga]

These days photos have an 'orientation' tag set in the EXIF information embedded in them. So instead of rotating the entire image, it just tells the software to show it in a particular direction. As mentioned above, this tag is sometimes set incorrectly when a phone is used to take a picture in a near horizontal orientation. That would show up on the phone as well though. It is more likely that the software being used (Openboard) is not able to deal with these orientation tags. You're on the right track in using a photo editor to fix this, but I would suggest that after you open it in a photo editor and making any adjustments necessary, you save a copy of the photo and use that. I have not tried it, but that may 'reset' the orientation tag to the correct attitude.