Added images changed orientation when using RM8’s Drop New Media window

If you click on a jpg in RM8 media folder and then click the edit tool in the right sidebar that photo opens in mac Preview which does allow rotation. If you double click the photo in RM8 it opens inside the app with apparently no tools at all.

My media are mainly PDF files which open outside of RM8 in mac Preview for easy editing. PDFs also have the virtue of allowing related files to be combined in one file (document, transcript and source/citation).

There are two questions in the message. The first is whether or not drag and drop is the only way to link images into RM. The answer is no. There are other ways. The main other way is that when you do an Add Media, there is a tiny folder icon at the far right end of the Filename line. Click on that tiny little folder, and you will be in the Windows or Mac dialog for selecting a file.

In Windows terms, I would say that you are in Windows File Explorer. I don’t know what it is called on a Mac. In any case, select the file you wish to link to RM and click Ok. You may or may not need to navigate to a different folder, but if so then such navigation is available while you are down in Windows or a Mac. That’s the way I link images into RM. I seldom use drag and drop even though I know it’s there and I know how to use it.

The other question is why doesn’t RM8 allow you to rotate an image. I don’t know all the reasons. But one reason is that RM7 supported an image editor that was a very poor image editor. It had several bad features (or lack of features), but the worst one for me was that if you simply looked at an image without changing anything and said OK, the editor saved your image. That perhaps doesn’t sound so bad, but for JPG files it meant that the quality of your image was degraded. If you looked at the same image again in RM7 and said Ok again, your image was degraded again, etc.

I’m quite content that the RM8 image view is only a viewer and that it can’t degrade my images. Instead I can click the Edit icon for an image and it will open the image in my default Windows or Mac image program. I can do the rotate from there if I wish. And it will be a much better image editor than the old RM7 image editor.

I used to link PDF files into RM on a regular basis, and indeed I usually preferred PDF files to JPG files. They opened in an external viewer which I considered to be a good thing, and a PDF can contain multiple pages. However, I am gradually switching over to linking JPG files into RM instead. One reason is that JPG files can be printed as a part of RM’s Scrapbooks and PDF files cannot.

The other reason is that I’m beginning to publish more of my genealogical data for non-living people on the Web. I’m including images with the data on the Web. It’s not that Web browsers don’t support PDF files at all, because they do. It’s rather that the way Web browsers support PDF files requires an extra click to view the PDF and the image is not just “there” on the Web page without no further intervention by the user who is looking at my pages.

It can be more work to switch from PDF’s to JPG’s because I often have to extract the images from a PDF to a JPG and I often have to have multiple JPG’s for a single PDF. But for my purposes, it’s worth the extra effort. If I were not wanting to print Scrapbooks from RM or publish my RM to the Web including images, I would surely stick with PDF’s.

By the way, simply rotating a JPG file can be a little trickier than it sounds. To do it properly and without loss of resolution of your images, the program doing the rotation has to do what is called a lossless rotation. Many programs that can rotate a JPG file rotate it and save it in such a way that the resolution of the file is degraded. I’m pretty sure the rotations you could do in RM7 were not lossless rotations and did degrade the quality of your image. So think it would be extremely useful if a feature were added to RM8 where it would support a lossless rotation of your image files, even if it wouldn’t do any other editing of your image files.

Mac’s Preview image handler seems to rotate with any impact on image quality. You can choose to lower the quality but it is an explicit action.

I prefer pdfs over jpgs especially since Ancestry will download documents as one file with the document, transcript and source citation all together. FTM 2019 does not care about the media file type unlike RM8 which defaults to JPG only unless you change it for each media item–a pain.

Thank you both, Jerry and Rooty, much appreciated; problem solved/managed and workable.
Jerry, I would never have found the tiny folder icon without help even with my best reading glasses!
I have found a creative way of scanning the A4 paper sized landscape vital records without having to rotate them. I scan them to the larger A3 paper size and then crop to A4. Scanning with the correct orientation to start with avoids the rotation problem. The cropping in Windows 10 using the inbuilt editing in Windows Pictures App does not affect file size so I still get a good image of some 2.65mb.
The images imported from RM7 are fine on orientation in RM8 as they have, as necessary, already been rotated in RM7 and come across as they should be. I now need to re-scan some 20 new vital records using the new methodology and that should work out fine.
Thanks again.

Thanks for that info. I will certainly be trying it. The question I have is ‘how inefficient is it for EACH user to be going through their affected photos running this program’. Surely it would be much more efficient for the RootsMagic developers to add it to the processing so it works for everyone automatically. I would certainly appreciate anything that saved a bit of time. I find everything I have to do in RM8 really cumbersome with the number of clicks that are required for anything at all. Please guys would you consider this?

PDF’s vs. JPG’s is an interesting question. I think it may depend on what your are doing with your data. A PDF file is really sort of a container rather than being a graphics file. As such, a PDF “container” can contain zero or text, it can contain zero or more images, and it can contain both text and images combined together in a single file. It’s all very neat and convenient and easy to manage. But there are some disadvantages. For example, a PDF file cannot be used for the single image that can be printed in a RM’s narrative reports. PDF files cannot be printed in RM’s scrapbook reports. If you use some sort of tool to publish your RM data to the Web, you can include PDF files on your Web pages with some such tools. And the PDF files can be viewed by Web browsers. But a user will have to click on a PDF file that’s on a Web page to get it to display in a Web browser whereas a JPG file is just there on an Web page and doesn’t have to be clicked to be viewed.

The situation for JPG’s is just the reverse. They work well to be the single image that can be printed for each person in RM’s narrative reports and they work well with RM’s scrapbook reports. They work well with Web pages. But they can’t include multiple images or text mixed with images. Essentially they are just a single image and they are not containers.

I used to use PDF files extensively in RM for the obvious reasons. But I have switched over mostly to using JPG files in RM because I am now publishing my RM data on the Web and I want my images to appear on my Web pages without them needing to be clicked by the user.