Story Maps Flip Photos from Portrait to Landscape

[JoeBorgione]

This is probably the silliest thing I've ever come across.  I have dozens of portrait images I'd like to add to a story map and at no extra charge, the story map flips the orientation.

There are several different articles going back to 2017 of people saying 'rotate it 90 degrees and then back again before uploading' or 'strip out the exif metadata'.  Huh? It's 2020; I spent a boatload of money to get high res, georeferenced photos on an iPhone 11 Pro Max, and I have to mess around them to get them into a story map?

Please say it isn't so...

[DanPatterson]

or the save to your desktop first suggestion?

https://community.esri.com/thread/232817-keeping-images-properly-oriented 

[JoeBorgione]

Tried it and it still flips it.  

Installed piexif and and ran piexif.remove(filename.jpeg) and then added that to the story map and it still flips it.

All I want to do is share my pictures of petrified wood with something a little more sophisticated than a shared google album. I got a couple dozen more just like this:

[DanPatterson]

Nice wood... That looks like a sizeable trunk

Kelly Gerrow‌ ... any ideas, this has us stumped

[JoeBorgione]

this has us stumped       

Once I get this figured out, I'll post the link; the pic above is nothin' !

[OwenGeo]

All -- I'm very sorry you are running into this issue with your uploaded photos. Unfortunately there is no easy solution to this pesky problem as there is no universal way image rotation is stored/read by different systems, but we are looking into it and hope to be able to address this in an upcoming release.

For now, here's a workaround that should help. On a Mac, open one of the images that's giving you trouble in Preview and rotate it 90 degrees four times (using the button shown in the screenshot, below) so that it's back to the expected orientation. Then save the image. That should update the rotation info and cause it to be oriented as you expect after being uploaded to the story. I imagine there is a similar workaround for Windows using the standard image viewer app.

[JoeBorgione]

Thanks for your tip Owen Evans‌ but I'm using a windows 10 machine to author the story map.  I actually tried to 'fool' it by rotating it and saving it, but then it just accepts the rotated image and I'm back to square one.

[MiaMassicotte]

I used to have this problem with my iPhone photos, but not with photos I took with my iPad. Apart from EXIF. with iPad my normal camera position has button on the right, so device is *already* in landscape mode, hence my iPad photos dI'd not have this issue. But not when I took a photo in portrait mode with my iPhone (which seems natural as I'm holding the iPhone upright with one hand, button is at the bottom and image fills the whole screen). My fix might be old news to you, but now I hold my iphone in landscape -- as though I'm holding a camera -- with the button on the right; then no exif problem. Otherwise, I do make a copy and rotate to landscape mode to use it for uploading/sharing with the non-Apple universe.

fwiw,

Mia

[JoeBorgione]

I guess I just don't understand the rotate to landscape idea; I do that and my image is sideways.  The story map does that for me.  What am I missing here?

[MiaMassicotte]

I make a duplicate of my original iPhone Xr photos (if taken in portrait mode) and rotate it to landscape while it's still on the iPhone. That's the one I upload. it's pretty easy to tell in the photo selector which is the landscaped image.  When taking new photos, I hold my iphone in the 'camera' position so that the button is on the right.

For me, these practices have resolved the frustrating and quirky automatic flipping problems where I couldn't get my photos to behave. 

Mia