[Digikam-users] About the exif orientation tag and how digikam handles it

[Gilles Caulier]

On Sunday 10 September 2006 23:42, Pedro Venda wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've looked around the archives and googled a fair bit about this
> subject/issue but couldn't find any solid answer. So I decided to ask the
> guys who know, at the cost of potentially being publicly humiliated with a
> bold RTFM :) - hope not.
>
> I've recently bought a digital SLR camera and already I've got about 3GB of
> photo albums. I use digikam and picasa to handle my photo albums, but
> digikam is a better, more robust and more complete product.
>
> All of my photos have the following exif orientation tags:
> * top, left - for landscape shots
> * left, bottom - for portrait shots (right hand up)
>
> In digikam 0.9.0-beta1 [1], by checking the Settings -> Configure Digikam
> -> Metadata -> "Show images/thumbs rotated according to orientation tag"
> [2] box, I hoped to get a thumbnail preview screen similar to picasa's,
> with "left, bottom" pictures vertically oriented (that's what the exif
> orientation tag is there for). However, it doesn't happen; All pictures
> show up as landscape shots [3]. I believe this is a bug, but I may be
> missing something.
> Even though it wasn't really a solution but more a workaround, I solved
> this once by checking the "rotate/flip image" box in the camera import
> dialog [4], but now I can't even reproduce it - all imported pictures show
> up as landscape shots even with different exif orientation tag.
> Another way to solve this was the 'jhead -autorot *.JPG', but that's just
> like eliminating the exif orientation tag...
>
> The way I think it should work is by rendering the pictures and thumbnails
> oriented according to the exif orientation tag, independently from scanning
> or importing the files - like picasa does. (sorry for the comparison)
> What do you think about this? Is this a bug or am I interpreting the exif
> orientation tag wrongly?
>
> [1]: http://mega.ist.utl.pt/~pjlv/sshot-01-version.jpg
> [2]: http://mega.ist.utl.pt/~pjlv/sshot-02-configure.jpg
> [3]: http://mega.ist.utl.pt/~pjlv/sshot-03-nonrotated.jpg
> [4]: http://mega.ist.utl.pt/~pjlv/sshot-04-rotated.jpg
>

Pedro, 

There are some pictures vertically oriented using the same Exif orientation 
tag but without the same thumbs rendering. Or something is wrong in digiKam, 
or your thumb database have been broken (0.8.x -> 0.9.0 or konqueror stuff... 
look my previous messages for details)

Can you give me some vertically oriented pictures from your Canon camera ? I 
will test in my computer... 

Gilles

> Congratulations for a great software and keep up the excelent work!
> Best regards,