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Photos Are Upside Down

Since iOS5 you notice that iPhone photos and videos are upside down when you save them to your computer. They are upside down when you email them to other people.

To reproduce: when you hold your camera with the volume buttons pointing up, your photos will be upside down when viewed with a Microsoft Windows computer.

Culprit: Apple's improper use of EXIF tags. Apple used a shortcut and skipped writing the correct orientation to EXIF so that their camera app would be quicker.

Resolution: Take your iPhone photos and videos with the volume buttons pointing down. You can also use a smarter app that is made to write the correct orientation to EXIF within the image file. It is reported that an app called Camera+ for the iPhone will take care of this for you.

Other info: It is said that Windows image views often don't recognize the image metadata. What Apple calls Metadata is the EXIF info within the image. The image can be upside down and have EXIF data that says "this image is upside down so flip it to view it" and then modern image viewing software is supposed to read this EXIF metadata and know to flip the image when displaying it. Well, that is kind of like putting all the photographs upside down in the family photo album, then on the cover post a note to hold the album upside down when viewing the photographs! How dumb is that? Why not just save the damn image in the correct orientation and skip the meta data bs? Well newer Windows image views including those bundled with Windows 8 and above will read the EXIF meta data and flip images that are upside down. Still, what a bunch of extra nonsense for a problem that could be solved by Apple just saving the image correctly.