iPhone Photo Flipping

[Stu Jackson]

In a recent thread about below decks autopilot, this came up.  I've removed the photo questions from that thread and here are the answers, which I'll leave as a sticky for a while and also put it up on the 101 Topics.

LogoFreak
Off topic, does anyone know how to fix images that somehow get displayed flipped either 90° or 180°? They display just fine on my phone but then get flipped once uploaded. Annoying...

Robert Giroux
The gist of it is that there are two ways to rotate an image, one is via a metadata instruction and the other is by a physical reorganization of the pixels and encoding. The metadata one requires a lot less processor cycles and Memory, so it is preferred, but it's not "obeyed" by all software, like in this forum. You have to rotate the images in software that performs a physical rotation. Typically this would be any image editing software like Photoshop and many others.


Stu Jackson

https://www.nscale.net/forums/showthread.php?48674-Rotating-Pictures-Taken-With-An-iPhone

For those who don't (like to) click on links, here's what two folks there said:

    I have seen a few people attach pictures sideways to their posts. I have also done this on several occasions. However I found that if I edit the picture on my iPhone before attaching it the picture is then attached with the correct orientation.

    To edit the picture I click on the Photo App to open it. I then click on the picture I want to edit. When the picture opens I click on the Edit button in the top right of the screen. When the editor opens I click on the "magic wand" and then on the Done button that is in the lower right of the screen. I then close the Photo App and attach the picture to a post as I normally would.

    I hope this will help others as this seems to work for me.

    Regards,
    Warren

**********************


    Random thoughts about iPhone photos....

    The iPhone recently switched to HEIC as a format. It's smaller for photos, and also encodes the "Live Photo" thing. Unfortunately a lot of other stuff doesn't support it yet.

    You can of course import them into Photos and edit/modify/export there. This is what most people know/do.

    You can open "Image Capture" in applications. Some folks might have used this for controlling a scanner. Well, if your iPhone is plugged in and unlocked you can select it and see all the photos in a filesystem like view. They can be selected and dragged out as raw files to wherever you want. This is also a great way to get raw video off the iPhone. Then you can process in whatever program you want.

    If your Mac supports AirDrop, you can "share" the photo on the iPhone and AirDrop it to yourself -- it will appear on the Mac in the Download's folder. This preserves the raw format.

    If on the phone you Share and then e-mail the photo to yourself when you hit send on the mail message it will ask you Small/Medium/Large/Original. Selecting Small/Medium/Large converts to a .JPG before sending. I often e-mail photos to myself on "Medium" and then use them directly on here as it's a good size for images and saves other conversion steps.

    Oh, and if you're in an e-mail, hold your finger down to get the cut/copy/paste dialog. Right arrow and you can "Insert Photo or Video".

    If you have a photo on disk that's the wrong orientation, you can open in preview, rotate and save. This is generally faster than importing into Photos and exporting.

    --
    Leo Bicknell

[KWKloeber]

    To edit the picture I click on the Photo App to open it.

There are also several free (w/ ads) iOS apps in the apple store.  They all can rotate an iPhone photo; change the photo size or DPI and save it back or save back a copy.  Some are more friendly than others to use (personal preference, so try them.)

I have:
Image Size
Pix
Resize it
Resizer
Darkroom

Darkroom will also change formats back and forth from/to (HEIC, JPEG, TIFF, PNG) and can compress HEIC and JPEG (there are presets at 100%, 95%, 80%.) 
(It tries to sell you an upgrade but just bypass that.)

The ViewExif app displays hidden data about the iPhoto (format, physical size, etc) but does not modify it.