…digital cameras have included a device that tracks the orientation of the camera and puts that information into the image file’s metadata. Applications that display images read that information and present the image rotated accordingly. The orientation information is expressed as an integer and written to a specific field in the EXIF metadata for the image. (…) Unfortunately, I happen to take a lot of photographs looking down, with the camera’s image sensor in a nearly horizontal plane. In this position, the orientation device–which presumably uses gravity to figure out which way is up–doesn’t have much to go on, and the value of the Orientation field is kind of a crapshoot. I think it reports the orientation the camera was in just before I pointed it down to take the picture. And that could be any orientation, because I never think about how I’m holding the camera before I’m ready to shoot.
soours
