How to fix photos that are rotated incorrectly

You may notice that sometimes when attaching a photo to a message or quote or when adding a photo to your PromoKit photo gallery that the image is not rotated correctly. This is not a bug, but rather a fairly technical behind-the-scenes issue that involves the photo's orientation metadata and a web browser's inability to interpret it. We do make an effort to automatically detect and correct the issue, but due to a variety of possibilities, some images may not be caught and properly rotated.

What causes it?

Cameras, especially those on mobile phones and tablets, have built-in orientation sensors that assign special rotation information to every photo they take. Behind the scenes, this tells other apps what the correct rotation angle should be for that photo.

In other words, your photos are actually taken and saved sideways, but then extra orientation metadata specifies a rotation angle for correctly displaying the photo. When you view that photo in your phone's gallery or in an app that understands the orientation metadata, it appears as if the image is rotated properly when it's actually not.

Unfortunately, web browsers rarely honor orientation metadata. This is why a photo might appear sideways after it has been uploaded on GigSalad.

What can you do to fix it?

To make sure that a photo will be displayed properly in web browsers, the best option is to re-save the photo with proper rotation and without orientation metadata. On a mobile device, you can often achieve this by opening a photo and rotating it 360 degrees or until it appears correctly, then re-saving it as a new photo.

Alternatively, you could save a slightly cropped version of the same photo. You could also download the photo onto a desktop computer and adjust it using the basic photo apps built into OSX and Windows (both called Photos) or an advanced photo editing program such as Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom.