Photos in Map Story are upside down.

[KevinBurkman1]

Good morning. I am attempting my first foray into a Map Story project. Using the Map Story Shortlist template, I attempted to load photos into my first tab, which represents hiking sites. Unfortunately, the photos were upside down. I went into my photo editor to verify the photos were oriented correctly, and they were. I then tried to "trick" the process by inverting the photos in the photo editor, but with no success- the photos were still upside down when I loaded them into the Story Map tab.

This is really frustrating- does anyone know why this is happening, or what can be down to correct it?

Thanks!

Kevin B.

[StephenSylvia]

Can you attach one of your photos so we can test it?

[KevinBurkman1]

Stephen,

Thanks so much for responding so quickly. I have attached a photo.

Kevin Burkman

[MarkCooney]

Hi Kevin,

The photo you provided loaded as expected for me.  What browser, and Operating System are you using?

Mark

[KevinBurkman1]

Operating system is Windows 8.1

Browser is Google Chrome

[StephenSylvia]

Kevin, I just tested your photo as well and it uploaded with the correct orientation. Are you still having an issue getting the correct orientation? Could you also try clearing your browser cache?

[KevinBurkman1]

I just cleared my cache and loaded some photos- they continue to come in

upside down. I have attached a screen shot.

Kevin

[StephenSylvia · Accepted solution]

Kevin, looking into this further, I think you may be running into an issue because you are using window 8.1 and the windows photo viewer to manually change the photo orientation.

There are two main ways to rotate a photo:

1. Change the orientation meta tag in the photo exif data.
2. Rotate the actual photo (pixels) and save it.

Almost all cameras and smartphones change the orientation by setting the orientation meta data in the exif. This is the go to standard and what web browsers read to display the photo correctly.

Unfortunately, older versions of windows do not read the exif orientation data and the default windows image viewer rotates images using process 2 above. See this support article from Microsoft: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2001954/picture-orientation-set-by-a-camera-is-not-honored-.... 

When you rotated the photo in Windows, you rotated the pixels but the exif data tells the browser to rotate it again so you get a double rotation. To fix this, try rotating the photo in windows back to the original orientation. Alternatively, you could try using a different photo editor to rotate your photos.

[KevinBurkman1]

Wow, that's an unusual workflow, but it works like a charm- thanks so much

for your help!

Kevin

[ElizabethMoore2]

Hello,

If your image is flipping sideways it could be due to height. The easiest solution is to crop it more to a square that fits in the Shortlist thumbnails.

Hope this helps somebody,

Elizabeth