I have inherited a ton of family items that I am trying to catalogue however I am spending a ton of time uploading, deleting, rotating, uploading, deleting.
I am surprised after all these years a fix hasn’t been implemented. It has taken me all morning to upload 10 pictures because I have to spend so much time trying to “fix” an image. I have used irfanview, paint, ect… sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Currently I have uploaded this picture and deleted it 8 times without getting it correct.
I guess the discussion I want to start is this, why doesn’t RM respect the rotation tag? I assume there is a reason.
I think that you’ll find that if you simply rotate the image that you are entering, even if is a full rotation and save that, you won’t have an issue in RM.
That is what I do, if the image in RM is side-wards or upside down, I go to the original in my folder open it in what ever viewer or editor you use, then rotate it, (even if it is shown right way up, this would be a full revolution) then save and close it. This sets the flag and then it will be correct in RootsMagic. Not sure why you are having to delete anything though.
If the internal rotation needs to change you can refresh the thumbnail after fixing by forcing the save on the Edit Media panel. Put a space in the caption or description field and Save is available.
Yes, be aware that RM program internals use a thumbnail for display purposes, not the actual image. That thumb is created when a media filepath is first linked into the program. Any (all) changes to that actual image, after it’s been linked, will not be reflected in the thumbnail. You could rotate it, paste additional elements into it, change colors, blank it out, etc… the thumb won’t change as long as the original filename and filepath remains the same (the thumb was made from the original media). So, You can force refresh the thumb (as rzamor1 said). Otherwise, delete from within RM and then re-link the changed media filepath to get a new thumbnail.
That indeed is the fundamental question. It is correct that you can rotate the image from outside of RM to solve the problem. But the problem wouldn’t need to be solved in the first place if only RM would respect the rotation tag. Therefore, respecting the rotation tag should be an enhancement request for RM.
The rotation tag is a part of the EXIF metadata that can be assoicated with JPG files. Not all JPG files have EXIF data. For JPG files that do include EXIF data, there are a bunch of different tags. The official name of the tag that controls rotation and reflection is the orientation tag. It has 8 possible values - 4 values for rotations and 4 values for reflections.
Getting a JPG image rotated correctly for RM can be tricky because sometimes all that the software manipulating the JPG file will do will be to change the orientation tag. But because RM doesn’t honor the orientation tag, simply manipulating the tag doesn’t accomplish anything at all for RM. The software has to actually rotate the image, and sometimes it can be hard to find software that will do that for you rather than just manipulating the tag.
I should also mention that JPG is what is called a lossy format. What that means is that if you edit a JPG file and then save it, it usually is saved with less resolution than the original. After just one edit and save, you might not notice the difference. But after a series of edits and saves of the same JPG file, the difference can become very noticeable. The image can become very grainy.
As a result, if you are looking at software to rotate a JPG file, you want to look for software that will do a lossless rotate. For example, Irfanview is a very popular JPG viewer and editor., but its default rotate is lossy. It has a feature to do a lossless rotate, but the lossless rotate is what’s called a plugin that’s not part of Irfanview by default. So you have to download and install the lossless plugin separately. Also, Irfanview comes in a 32 bit version and a 64 bit version, but all the plugins are 32 bit. So if you want to use the Irfanview plugins, you have to install the 32 bit Irfanview rather than the 64 bit Irfanview.
By the way, the JPG viewer in RM7 was also a JPG editor. it was not a very powerful editor, but nonetheless it was an editor. And it was a very lossy editor. I would not recommend anybody editing any JPG files using RM7’s JPG editor. The JPG viewer in RM8/9/10 is only an viewer and not an editor. So it is perfectly safe to use. Even though it’s totally safe to use the RM8/9/10 JPG viewer, I still prefer to view files from within RM by using Irfanview. I don’t edit them with Irfanview. I just view them. Doing it that way works in RM because Irfanview is my computer’s default JPG editor and because I can click on the Edit icon rather than the Looking Glass icon when looking at media files, and RM responds to the Edit icon by opening the JPG file using my computer’s default JPG editor.
If you use a separate program designed for photo management such as the free XnView then you can select a whole batch of photos and apply one or more transformations such as lossless rotate to them all at once. You can also batch rename in various ways. This is much quicker than doing them all individually and you can apply metadata such as IPTC data to multiple images too and add captions, location details etc.
I use XnView classic version for Windows but I believe it is also available for other systems.
I appreciate all the input and the feature suggestion to RM.
Unfortunately I am still having issues finding a consistent way to manage my photos. I was able to rotate and refresh some but others photos wont take the new orientation. I think photos are very important to what we do. It feels archaic to spend this much time on adding them.
Thanks again for talking me off the ledge. I have teetered on continuing with RM for a few years and every time it’s the engagement of this community that makes me work through my issues and stay. Thank you!