Hey there, so sometimes i have to rotate images in windows to get them shown correctly. And if i then upload these images to MB, there are sometimes errors and the images don’t seem to have been rotated. I am sure, that the mistake is on my side, but how can i avoid it?
So i knew it would happen again, i made a screenshot before an upload:
here you can see the result: Release “Smokes Like Lightning” by Lightnin’ Hopkins - Cover Art - MusicBrainz
These images contain bad orientation metadata, try to set it right or remove it altogether:
Ideally, orientation flags should be stripped out and thumbnails and end image should show consistently.
Then if we see wrong oriented thumbnail, we would know the upload would be wrong too.
Second fix/enhancement: we could fix orientation with arrows on thumbnail preview before upload.
What are you rotating it with? Try paint.net or IrfanView They are my favourite free Windows image tools. (Among many others available) Quick, easy to use, very standards compliant.
Note that these two don’t do lossless rotation by default. Not the end of the world, but also not ideal e.g. if you rotated an image a bunch of times it would be noticeably degraded.
Apparently Irfanview can do it almost out of the box:
IrfanView can indeed rotate JPEG images in a lossless way, and it indeed needs the JPG_TRANSFORM plugin to do that. Luckily that plugin is already included in a normal install of IrfanView. To check you have the plugin: go to Help → Installed PlugIns and check if JPG_TRANSFORM.DLL is in the list.
There are other programs around as well if you google for ‘lossless jpg rotation’.
i use irfan view for most of my image editing. glad to hear, that after all these years it is still known 
so i have and had the plugin activated, just loaded the (for me correctly displayed images), changed nothing and saved again with IV and tried again. and it seems to work
the uploads on my initial posting had been made via Windows Explorer (?) “Right Click” → “Rotate right” (“Nach Rechts drehen”)
that’s really good to know!
You surprise me - Microsoft’s built in tool failing to follow standards and just bodging a result? [/sarcasm] Yeah - long ago avoided using that quick fix tool. Doesn’t surprise me getting buggy results.
Isn’t that “by default”? I’ve been using IrfanView as my goto flip, twist and resize tool for over a decade. That transform is installed by default as far as I can tell.
The lossless jpg transformation and crop tools work via a plugin. Shift-J or Ctrl-Shift-J.
Ah, okay, thanks. I can see how it would slowly loose data as JPEG is encoded by row I believe, so swapping rows to columns would throw its maths out.
Does it still loose if you rotate 360 but don’t save in between?
