Landscape photos from my iPhone

Topics/tags: Rants, short

Yesterday, I posted a musing that involved a few landscape photographs. I’d taken the photos on my iPhone [1]. I’d forgotten about the potential problems involved. Since the volume buttons on the iPhone serve as camera buttons, I tend to take landscape photos with the buttons up. Through the magic of technology, my iPhone seems to know what side is up. Surprisingly, though, almost everything else seems to display them upside-down.

I haven’t done enough research on the topic [3]. As I understand it, because the lens is toward the bottom of the camera when you take landscape photos like I did, they are, in fact, upside down. However, the iPhone adds some metadata to indicate that it should be flipped.

That sounds reasonable, right? However, not everything reads that metadata. When I first put the jpegs in the musing, they appeared upside-down in my browser. So I used ImageMagick [4] to rotate them 180 degrees. That made them appear correctly in my browser. I thought I was done.

But it’s technology. And technology creates problems. When I posted the musing to Facebook, the image appeared upside-down again. It was right-side-up in my Mac browser, but upside-down in my iPhone browser [6].

Have I mentioned that I hate computers?

Eventually, I was able to solve the problem by converting the image to png format. There’s probably a better solution. However, I’m too lazy to search the InterWeb for more information.

Maybe in the future, I’ll remember the correct orientation for iPhone photos. Or maybe I’ll just remember to convert to png [7].

Postscript: Since the musing was about cleaning my office and its implications, it was almost funny that the photos are upside-down. At least one reader suggested that I cleaned my office by inverting it over a dumpster [8].

[1] I still use an iPhone 5S. I realize that the technology is nearly six years old. But it gets the job done. And, because of Apple’s Battery Replacement process [2], my iPhone 5S is relatively new.

[2] It’s too much effort to replace the battery. We’ll just give you a new phone. YMMV.

[3] It didn’t seem like it was worth the effort.

[4] ImageMagick is an awesome command-line tool for manipulating images. One of my goals for sabbatical is to learn it better [5].

[5] Yes, I realize that I have way too many goals for sabbatical.

[6] And on Facebook.

[7] I expect that I will remain too lazy to search the InterWeb.

[8] Or something similar.

Version 1.0 of 2019-07-03.