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...

[OwenGeo]

I apologize you are having this issue with incorrectly rotating photos. We have identified an issue in how photos are requested and sent to the app. This issue is being worked on by the back-end team and they hope to have it addressed in the next ArcGIS Online release in September.

[JoeBorgione]

Thanks Owen- glad to hear it's and issue that can be resolved.  If I were to join the early adopter program, would I be able to test it out between now and the anticipated release date? 

Owen Evans‌

[OwenGeo]

Hi Joe, since this is just essentially a bug fix, I'm not sure if/how that would be made available through the EAP.

[OwenGeo · Accepted solution]

All -- This issue has been addressed in last night's ArcGIS Online update. Images should no longer be incorrectly rotated after the upload completes.

Please let me know if you are still experiencing this issue.

[JoeBorgione]

Owen Evans‌ - what version/type  of story maps has this been fixed in?

[OwenGeo]

Joe Borgione‌ - As far as we know this issue was only reported in ArcGIS StoryMaps, but the fix was a back-end fix on the ArcGIS Online/API side.

[CodySanford]

Hello, as of Dec. 13th, 2020, I am still experiencing this issue of image rotating when it uploads into the StoryMap. Thank you!

[HardtBergman]

Update from June 2022: The problem was either not actually fixed by the update referenced in this post or has started occurring again. Photos that were right-side-up when I first published my StoryMap have since been rotated. I was able to solve the issue by stripping the exif data from the photos being affected, but I wanted to put it out these that the problem has returned.

[DBlake]

I realise this thread is a year old but I'm having the exact same issue with the new 'image gallery' in StoryMaps.  I've tried removing exif information and rotating 4 times and resaving but no joy.  Is there no fix yet? (obvious thing would be a rotation tool in the image gallery no?)

[DBlake]

Ok, after posting that I find a workaround in Windows 10.  Just rotating in Windows photo app does not work but if you click on edit >crop and rotate and then crop just a tiny bit and save the new orientation seems to finally carry through to StoryMaps.  Not ideal but will do for now!