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Images attached to posts - change portrait / landscape orientation?

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SiriusHardware

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Sorry if this is not the right place but I don't see any specific sub-forum for questions about the website itself.

In a recent post I attached three photos, two taken in landscape mode and one taken in portrait mode. When viewed on the camera itself (A Canon IXUS series compact) and on a windows PC the orientation of the portrait mode photo is correct, but after uploading and attaching it I find the forum has turned the image on its side. How do I avoid this happening, and can I do anything to re-orient it post-attachment?
 
This has been discussed a few times before. A lot of "modern" image programs apparently use metadata inside the file to specify rotation rather than re-encoding the image. The forum software apparently does not support that metadata. So the forum posts the images as they are really encoded, which may be sideways or upside down.

I don't know what the "best" solution is, but personally I would just use some older image processing tool that does not support that metadata, such as Paint Shop Pro 4 or something like that.

It is a good idea to pre-process images like that anyway, as the forum software here automatically re-compresses all images so they are 99k in filesize or less - which often messes up X*Y size or uses to much lossy compression. If you manually make sure your file is 99k or less then it won't touch it.

Of course, you could use an external image host, but I'm not aware of any current image sites that aren't out to replace their images with advertising.
 
I use the good old 'xv' program, unmodified so that it doesn't care about EXIF metadata, and then I click the left/right/up/down button as needed until it's the right way up, then 'save'.
 
It's got a portable version as well which is always nice.

Of course, there's always Irfanview which pretty much does everything. :)
 
OK gents, the situation as I now understand it:

My Canon Ixus camera saves all images in landscape format but 'tags' those which were taken in portrait mode so that the viewing software knows the image should be shown vertically.

Every bit of photo viewing software I possess, including those built into Windows, interprets this correctly and shows the images in the correct orientation.

The Forum software does not do this, and so shows all such images in landscape.

The fix, if I can call it that, is to

Load the image into one of my viewers

Save the correctly oriented image in a more primitive image file format which does not contain / use this type of metadata and will therefore have to save the image correctly oriented.

Attach that version to my post.

Is that about how it is?
 
That should do it.

Of course you can always host it on a third party image hosting service or something similar. That way you can have it displayed in all it's full glory since the forum's software won't get to resize/resample it at all.
 
I'm not signed up for any such file hosting resource, mainly because there have been many times when I have been reading forums thread of interest to me - not just on this forum - and clicked on interesting attachments only to find that the link to the OP's chosen hosting service is broken, making the post much less useful.

So although forums like this one do sometimes crush the life out of attachments like schematic diagrams almost to the point of unreadability, I still prefer the forum itself to hold the attached images and then at least they will probably remain valid and accessable for the lifetime of the post itself.
 
If you choose one of the more reliable hosts you shouldn't have that problem. Dropbox, Imgur and Box come to mind as free hosts and there are others.
 
Unfortunately dropbox links don't last - my own had to be updated (which, as we know, can't be done in the forum). Dropbox will sometimes change their paths so that you have to generate new links.
And then there's the whole dropbox issue.. more and more companies block access to well-known 'shared' storage sites, due to potentially downloading malicious code to office computers. So no dropbox images will show if you browse the site during lunchtime.
 
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