This is basically a wish list post - I really wish that Survey123 would better accommodate photographs taken in landscape orientation. For land conservation work, that's the best orientation. I am working on a survey created in Surver123Connect, version 3.24.31. It allows for image capture and when images are downloaded and saved separate from the survey data, the azimuth values (gpsImgDirection) are only correct for portrait-oriented images. Landscape images are off by 90 degrees or so. I understand that this is supposed to be by design, as allegedly Survey123 expects images captured on relatively small devices such as a smart phone to be oriented up (making for portrait photo orientation). But it appears that the incorrect azimuth is being enforced by Survey123 and not by the native phone.
I recently took four photographs - two in Survey123 and two using the iPhone camera. In each case I took a photograph pointing in the same direction (East) but altered the orientation to either portrait or landscape . I downloaded all four photographs (two from the Survey123 web interface and two directly from the phone) and extracted the EXIF data for longitude, latitude, and azimuth (results in the attached PDF). Only in the landscape image taken by Survey123 does the azimuth report incorrectly. Since the native camera gets the azimuth values correct, regardless of the orientation, I have to conclude that the Survey123 app is recording the EXIF header data for gpsImgDirection wrong, and actually writing the wrong value to the EXIF header - despite the fact that the phone knows the correct value. Why can't this be fixed?
