Even within Microsoft implementation of the orientation setting is erratic. The above image was taken with a Sony camera turned 90 degrees, so the JPG was saved in the camera with the rotate setting set to display the image in portrait mode.īecause the orientation setting wasn’t part of the original JPG format, not all programs make use of it. Some modern cameras have a little gyroscope inside and will use the rotate setting to indicate which orientation to display the picture. This orientation/rotate setting means only a small change has to be written to a JPG image and that’s faster and less likely to mess up the entire image. It’s like a ‘This way up’ sign on a painting. With this setting you don’t have to rewrite the entire image, instead just add a small detail to tell programs which way to display the image. More recently, an addition to JPEG was implemented – the EXIF orientation setting. That was time consuming and more prone to failure or loss of quality if done incorrectly. When the JPEG format was developed, the only way to rotate an image was to move all the pixels around and then rewrite the entire image. The image looks OK in the Insert dialog but gets turned around when it’s inserted into Word, Excel etc. You might strike the same problem with Insert Picture into any Office application.
