EXIF orientation tag in Scrapbook

[alekth]

Title
EXIF orientation tag in Scrapbook

Short, concise description of the idea
Support the landscape/portrait EXIF orientation tag of jpg images uploaded to Scrapbook

Full description of the ideaiPad/iPhone, and maybe other mobile devices and cameras, seem to use an EXIF property to declare a picture's orientation to be portrait (seems the default is

Comments

[andy]

I think we already support that in a way. However, note that original images (original.jpg) always have the exact binary data uploaded by a client, so if a client didn't rotate it properly, it would depend on browser supporting that EXIF property. Unfortunately, most browsers don't support that at this time.

Whether this can/should be changed is a subject to discussion, though.

[siderea]

Why should it be up to the browser? (Yes, yes, yes I'm a web dev, I understand that image in == image out; I'm asking about responsibility not functionality.) If we want LJ to work as gracefully as its competitors, it seems it better handle this better than it does and take some responsibility for handling that issue.

I propose LJ should, on upload, examine images for whether their EXIF orientation matches their present orientation, and then where they don't, by default, generate a rotated version of the pix for serving when called, and serve that instead; and in Scrapbook, with the rest of a picture's properties, there should be a ticky box for controlling that. By default for all pix (going forward) "Correct rotation" should be selected; it should be greyed out where an image's orientation matches that specified in its EXIF; in this way, if somebody doesn't want their EXIF honored on a picture, they can turn it off

[andy]

The reason it was originally done this way is that Flickr does it this way - it respects EXIF for resized images and it returns original data verbatim for original images. I doubt anyone cares about original images much though because no one really needs to see them on a 72dpi monitor; however, if this turns out to be a problem with mobile posting, it needs to be investigated. For one, I know that the iPhone app handles the EXIF tags on the client side, so the original images posted by that are rotated properly.

It is not much of a technical problem to have an (opt-out) option to serve rotated images, but I can't see a way to implement it without cluttering the UI. Having the 'original' original image available at 'xxxx_verbatim.jpg' and unavailable through the drop-down menus seems to be a better solution to me, assuming that we care that much about both preserving the original content and showing that content rotated by default.

I guess I will need to think about the issue a bit more and discuss it with the colleagues, heh.

[siderea]

Thank you for the thoughtful comment.

I doubt anyone cares about original images much though because no one really needs to see them on a 72dpi monitor.

Hmm. I don't know that we can make the assumption that the only purpose of posting an image to LJ is to display it on a screen. Scrapbook is a repository that has permissions synced to one's LJ; as such, I bet someone, somewhere is using it as a distribution system for higher resolution image files to custom friends lists. Maybe chat up some of the photography comms, see if this would be an issue for them?

(Which suggests a Meta-Suggestion: I'd love to see LJ-as-an-institution actively solicit feedback from relevant comms in situations like this, instead of just hoping some of them are haunting Suggestions. For something that might impact how images are handled, why not search out the three biggest, most active photography and fan art groups, and post something that either brings the issue to them where they are, or invites them into a discussion here or on lj_dev. I'm not