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A particular image appears rotated (in the "portrait" orientation) when viewed in Thunderbird (as an e-mail attachment), Firefox, and Photoshop. However, it appears in the "landscape" orientation in Windows 7 Explorer and Windows Photo Viewer Why the inconsistency? Is there any way to fix that by changing settings in the viewer?

In this particular case, the "landscape" orientation is photographically correct, though the camera may have been in a funny position causing an accelerometer to think that a "portrait" orientation was intended.

As viewed in TB/FF/PS, I need to rotate the image counterclockwise 90 degrees to get it looking right. When I use Windows to do that, the orientation then changes to be "portrait" 90 degrees in the opposite rotational direction.

The workaround is to rotate it counterclockwise 90 degrees and then clockwise 90 degrees and then the image displays correctly and consistently in all viewers cited above. It is unintuitive that two opposite lossy rotations (which as opposite operations, should combine for no effect other than compression losses) should be required just to get an image displaying consistently in Windows and other viewers. What am I missing here?

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    OK, so how would one adjust Windows Photo Viewer to pay attention to EXIF orientation information?
    – WBT
    Commented Sep 19, 2015 at 15:53
  • Thanks for the helpful links; it appears MS doesn't care or respect EXIF orientation. The first doesn't really explain solutions, though, and the Import process (only time orientation flag is read, and used to change the image) doesn't apply to an image coming in by e-mail attachment (and it causes other issues w/the file too). +1 to: "Honor the rotation bit when you render something, not when you import the data. It's a bit like claiming to import my e-mail, while discarding some parts of the header because you claim to know that it's from the valid sender anyways."
    – WBT
    Commented Sep 19, 2015 at 16:23
  • Those operations aren't lossy. Windows 7 photo viewer does lossless rotation Are “Windows Photo Viewer” rotations lossless?
    – phuclv
    Commented Mar 8, 2021 at 3:24

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I had exactly the same problem. Found out that [exif:Orientation:] is only respected by some programs.

I have Bash Ubuntu for Windows 10 so I checked the exif data by using:

root@AW:/mnt/c/Users/me/Dropbox/Photos/folder# identify -verbose * |grep -i exif:orientation
    exif:Orientation: 6
    exif:Orientation: 3
    exif:Orientation: 3
    exif:Orientation: 3
    exif:Orientation: 6
    exif:Orientation: 6
    exif:Orientation: 6

Then I used jhead -autorot * in that folder. I then checked the exif data again, even though it showed correctly in the application I was using.

root@AW:/mnt/c/Users/me/Dropbox/Photos/folder# identify -verbose * |grep -i exif:orientation
    exif:Orientation: 1
    exif:Orientation: 1
    exif:Orientation: 1
    exif:Orientation: 1
    exif:Orientation: 1
    exif:Orientation: 1
    exif:Orientation: 1

Since you're using Win 7 you won't have Ubuntu for Windows, unless you've upgraded by now.

Here is some very useful information from: http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/exif-orientation.html

"Auto-Rotation Utilities There are several tools that allow the image content to be rotated losslessly in software, based on the information stored in the EXIF orientation flag. By far the best time to perform this is during image import (e.g. from memory card). Most import applications (such as DownloaderPro) can do this during the copy operation (from memory card to hard drive). Doing so ensure that all programs can see the image properly rotated, without having to rely on the EXIF Orientation flag. This means that even programs such as Microsoft's Windows Picture and Fax Viewer will also show correct orientation for portrait / vertical images.

Most programs will rotate the image content and then update the Orientation flag to reflect the new orientation (usually a value of 1), while still leaving other metadata intact."

Win 8 & 10 - Default Windows Photo Viewer - reads the exif tags and correctly displays the image.

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