Photo upload: Detecting picture orientation automaticaly and rotate properly.

  • sanfordlabscience
    Asked on April 15, 2015 at 1:56 PM

    Hi there, 

    When I upload photos to forms, the orientation is displayed wrong under certain circumstances. 

    Using Macbook Pro, and photos from an iPhone 5s, photos upload fine. I receive a confirmation email upon form submission which includes the form data and links to the photos. When downloaded or quickviewed through these links, the photos are in the correct orientation. Also in the email, I have included the link to download a .pdf copy of the form. Unfortunately, on the .pdf of the form the photos are not in the correct orientation. Also the orientation is not correct on the render of the form that can be viewed on the website on the submissions page (The .pdf that can be downloaded from this page has the bad orientation problem as well.)

     

    Any help to resolve this matter would be appreciated. I can provide additional info if needed. 

     

    Thanks

     

  • Mike
    Replied on April 15, 2015 at 5:48 PM

    Thank you for contacting us.

    It is most likely that we show uploaded images 'as is' on submissions page and PDFs, so there is no built-in image auto rotation option at JotForm.

    Can you please provide us with a form link in question? We will check the uploads, and escalate a ticket to our Development Team to see if the auto rotation option can be added.

  • sanfordlabscience
    Replied on April 16, 2015 at 6:05 PM

    Hi Mike,

     

    Here is an example form:  http://www.jotformpro.com/mkapust/LCshiftreport

     

    As you may be able to see from today's submission, the photo is sideways when displayed on the Submissions page, and in the pdf that can be downloaded, but when you click the link to display the photo by itself, it's right side up.

    Also, a separate but possibly related issue now seems to be that photos that were included on previous submissions are not being shown on the submissions page. 

     

  • Mike
    Replied on April 16, 2015 at 7:18 PM

    Images shot with iPhone/iPad are saved as Landscape Left with EXIF Orientation metadata specifying the actual orientation. However, orientation metadata is not always available, and not all the software utilize the orientation tag written by camera.

    It means that when you click on the image link, your computer software is smart enough to rotate the image, but for example Windows Photo Viewer will show the image in default Landscape orientation without rotation.

    I have attached a ticket to this thread to see if we can improve upload tool to automatically detect the orientation and rotate uploaded images.

    There is no ETA, but we will let you know if we have any updates on this.

  • lafhab2
    Replied on March 17, 2016 at 1:39 PM

    I would like to add to this issue, we have people taking images in portrait orientation on the ipad which come out as rotated left 90 degrees - ie landscape - in the PDF.  It would help enormously if images could be embedded in their native orientation rather than rotated.  Even a 'rotate' function for images on editing a submission would assist.

  • Nik_C
    Replied on March 17, 2016 at 1:58 PM

    @lafhab2 Thank you for your feedback, we already escalated this to our developers for a possible upgrade in that matter. As my colleague said we don't know the ETA but we'll inform about the outcome through this thread.

    Thank you!

  • sanfordlabscience
    Replied on March 17, 2016 at 2:06 PM

    Since this is still an issue, I should let people know I've found a workaround. Prior to adding the photos to the form I have discovered that uploading them to Dropbox first will "freeze" the orientation. I stumbled upon this approach a couple of months ago. When I then add the files from the Dropbox folder, they are in the correct orientation. If I add them from Photos.app they are not.