I added a new primary photo to my ancestor’s line (iphone13 pro). The photo looks fine on the desktop and in paint. When I add it to the RM9 program, it flips the photo sideways. I can’t find a “rotate” button anywhere. I’ve added the new update.
What am I doing wrong?
Hopefully I’ve included a photo of what the inserted photo looks like originally and in the RM9 program.
The file is surely a *.jpg file and *.jpg files support an optional orientation flag. I usually call it a rotation flag because the flag can be used to cause an image to be rotated. But in addition to rotation the flag can also be used to reflect an image, the same way a mirror reflects an image and effectively reverses right and left.
RM is not flipping the image sideways. The image is already sideways and it has an orientation flag that tells software that it needs to be rotated. Your desktop and paint are both honoring the orientation flag and flipping the sideways image so that it looks like it’s not sideways. RM is not honoring the orientation flag and therefore it is showing you the image in its natural sideways state.
This can be a hard problem to deal with because so much software will flip a sideways or upside down image for you so you don’t know it is sideways or upside down. In any case, the solution is to edit the image, rotate it, and save it back. On Windows, I’ve had pretty good luck just right clicking an *.jpg file from Windows file manager and using the rotate right and rotate left options that will appear in the dropdown menu.
In RM9, I ck “edit” (paint)- my photo shows as portrait vertical mode while the one in RM9 shows in landscape mode. (see photo enclosed). The original photo was taken in Portrait mode as a jpeg.
I edited the original photo on my phone by rotating one copy R and another copy L to try to get the correct result for RM9. When I added those two photos to media in RM9, that is exactly how they showed up – as rotated R or L. I then tried to edit the sideways photo (landscape mode) in the RM9 program and I got the result listed above (the one I needed to edit showed up as in portrait mode like the original and yet the one in RM9 showed up sideways.) I don’t see how I can edit a photo that shows how I want it to be before I touch it. What am I doing wrong?
The original was shot in portrait mode – it was not edited which has to mean the RM9 program is rotating it somehow.
I saved the photo in Paint (hadn’t been edited) - it just showed up as portrait mode and added it as an edited version to RM9 (just to know which photo was working) . It stayed in portrait mode.
That indeed can be a problem. If you rotate a photo with photo editing software, it’s hard sometimes to know if the software is really rotating the photo or if the software is simply manipulating the photo’s orientation flag. If the software is only manipulating the photo’s orientation flag, that’s of no help with RM.
I’m pretty old school and I do my video editing on my computer instead of on my phone. So I really can’t help provide any advice about how to deal with this situation on your phone. In Windows, I use a free program called Irfanview to most of my viewing of photos. It can also so some basic editing including rotation. And it can show you the actual orientation flag as a part of what’s called the EXIF data for a photo. But in general I prefer to do my editing including any needed rotating in Microsoft Paint (included free as a part of Windows).
Other users might have some advice to offer about rotating photos on a Mac or rotating photos directly on the phone. It’s hard to know for sure, but it sounds like your phone is simply manipulating the photo’s orientation flag rather than actually rotating the photo.
If You suspect but are not sure if an image has the EXIF Image Orientation flag set, then open the JPG in Paint and then just re-save it, as Paint will resave the image in the correct/viewed orientation.
The issue is that you rotated the image with a viewer. When you rotate this way your asking Windows which of the 4 sides do you want at the top. This rotates the image for viewing. RootsMagic bring the image as it was originally. You can rotate the image with Windows Photo viewer but you need to open up the editor portion of the viewer and rotate the image their. Then save it and bring it into RootsMagic again. Remember you need to delete the image in Media to get rid of the thumbnail file. If you don’t then it will still look rotates until you open it up to view it. Once that is closed it will still be rotated wrong until you delete it entirely from Media. Also you may have to do this process several time to get it rotated correctly. When you hope it up in Windows photo editor it will still be rotated and you don’t know how it was originally.
Good luck
You can rebuild all the thumbnails instead with just a couple of clicks.
It’s probably a good idea to rebuild all the thumbnails occasionally anyway, just to clean up the thumbnails for any media files that you might have changed from outside of RM. The problem with deleting an image in Media and adding it back in is that you then have to re-establish all of its media tags. That can be a very difficult process. If you edit or replace a media file from outside of RM and then rebuild all your thumbnails, then all your media tags will still be intact.
