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JPEG-EXIF autorotate


See also: JPEG-EXIF autorotate for Linux (KDE)

New in version 1.2:

  • Doesn't touch IPTC metadata anymore, old versions used to reset it in the process of rotating. (Thanks to jhead author Matthias Wandel for this fix and for compiling a head revision version of jhead for me!)
  • Also includes an option to set the dates of all files to the EXIF datetime field's value.
Download now!
Ver. 1.2 (206 KB)
Fixed: Leaves
IPTC data intact

Adds right click menu items to Windows for folders and photo files (.jpg, .jpeg). These allow you to effortlessly and losslessly rotate either:

  • single files,
  • all files in a folder or
  • all files in a folder and in all its subfolders.

according to the EXIF orientation metadata.

The idea

Many digital cameras write this EXIF data to photos, and using this application you can rotate the actual images to be the right side up. Note: With the default settings, all the rotated files will have their timestamp changed to the time and date at the moment of the operation. However, the datetime EXIF metadata inside the file will be preserved. You also have an option during the installation to have the app set the dates of all files to the EXIF datetime field's value. See readme.txt (below) for more info.

I have a Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z2 camera, which lets me rotate photos, but actually it doesn't really rotate them. It just edits the EXIF orientation metadata in the JPEG file. If I want the images to actually be the right side up, I have to rotate them with a computer. I found a solution by Thomas Bonfort, enhanced it to work in most Windows machines and made a Windows installer with NSIS. Uses jpegtran, jhead and ImageMagick. Some parts compressed with 7-Zip as SFX.

Future development

In the future JPEG-EXIF autorotate may also include other image operations using the aforementioned tools or ImageMagick, for instance (see also: jhead manual). If you have any thoughts about operations you would like to be capable of easily applying to images, please send me mail. Of course there is also the limitation that probably I won't be willing to have any other input from the user besides the file(s)/folder(s) to operate on.

Compatibility / Feedback

bless your dear, sweet little website for offering me the means by which i may now autorotate with glee! thank you for saving me fingers! <3 <3 <3 ^_^ -melissa :)

Please send me mail about your un-/succesful attempts to use JPEG-EXIF autorotate on different Windows versions and camera models. Fan mail ;) / Reports so far:

  • Windows Vista: I just wanted you to know that I installed it on my new Vista machine, and it works like a charm (full disclosure, I had actually already rotated the files I tested it on, but I can't imagine any Vista-specific difficulties that would occur only on an actual rotation). -Magnśs Žór Torfason
  • Windows 2000: tested it myself, works :)
  • Windows XP:
    • Tested successfully: French Windows XP SP2. Using Canon IXUS 40. (Thanks Brice)
    • I just want to say thanks for that little program it is a time saver! Works great with windows XP Pro w/SP2 using a Canon Digital Rebel. (Thanks to Jeff T.)
    • thanks for the program! Works with [Windows] XP SP2 (Danish) and pix from my Canon PowerShot S400! (thanks to Klaus Lauritsen)
    • JPEG autorotate works perfectly on : Windows XP SP2 (french) Images from a Pentax Ist DS (Thanks to Stephane Marzloff)
    • you have created a great piece of software, used it on a dutch and english version of winxp + sp2 on both used it for a digital ixus 40, canon eos 20d and 350d (thanks to Reinout Smit)
    • JPEG autorotation on EXIF data - seems to work well: UK WXP SP2. Thanks. (Thanks to Martin)
    • Dutch windows XP SP 2/Canon Powershot G5/works just fine/thx for the program (Thanks to Andries)
    • autorotate works with canon 350D (digital rebel/kiss) [...] using english win xp pro with sp2. (Thanks to jan novak)
    • Great Proggie! THX alot! Windows XPsp2 with an Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX9, everything works fine! 2 thumbs up! (Thanks to Herve Moser)
    • Your program to rotate jpg by using EXIF Info works on XP SP2 with Canon EOS 350D Pictures. Thanks a lot for this program. (Thanks to Dancorp)
    • i used it with pictures taken with a canon g5, US windows xp with sp2 (thanks to melissa)
    • it works perfectly with my panasonic lumix FX7 and winXP pro sp2 (Thanks to godefroy jerphanion)
    • We have tested it successfully in WinXP SP2 (English) with the following cameras: Nikon D70, Nikon D200, Nikon D2X. (Thanks VB)
    • works well (Canon ixus 400 / Win XP) (Thanks to Jerome BARON)
    • Canon 350d (Thanks to Matthew Bailey)
  • Just wanted to drop you a line concerning the autorotate software. I seriously love it! You saved me a LOT of time! (I have a canon IXUS 50, but I also used it on other peoples' pics) (Thanks to Pepijn :)
  • It's work well with images token from Minolta D5D. (Thanks to Der-Johng Sun)
  • Works great on my Canon Ixus 800 IS. (Thanks to Paul Papathomas)
  • It works great with a Lumix Panasonic FZ7. (Thanks to Raphaėl ALEMANY)
  • Tested unsuccessfully (?): Windows 98. (Brice)

Download

Links to JPEG-EXIF autorotate

readme.txt

JPEG-EXIF autorotate 
(version 1.2/2007-07-28) 
Right click menu items for Windows explorer for automatic 
JPEG rotating according to EXIF metadata

http://pilpi.net/software/JPEG-EXIF_autorotate.php
Please consult this URL to read the most up-to-date
version of this readme file.
* * * * * * 


What does it do?
---

According to the EXIF orientation metadata stored in JPEG 
files by digital cameras, JPEG-EXIF autorotate losslessly 
rotates the files which are oriented wrong, usually by 90 
or 270 degrees.

"I own a canon ixus digital camera, which has the ability 
to save the orientation the camera was in while taking the 
picture in tag in the exif headers of the pictures, thanks 
to a gravity sensor. Exif-enabled software can read this 
tag and display the images the right side up, but these 
programs are still uncommon (well, photoshop does, but the 
standard windows image viewer doesn't. The solution I 
prefer is to rotate the images in the correct direction 
once and for all, and then I can forget about using exif 
enabled software" -Thomas Bonfort, the original writer of 
the batch files

The graphical user interface of the application is the 
right-click menu items in Windows. (Clicking any one of 
them will launch jhead with the appropriate command line 
parameters in a console window.) See "Acknowledgements" 
below for further details.


Usage
---

Run the installer, follow the instructions. 

As of JPEG-EXIF autorotate 1.2, during installation there 
are two choices with the "Set the timestamp of selected 
files to EXIF date" selection:

- Not selected (default): jpegtran will change the 
timestamp of all the rotated files to the current 
date and time (of rotating).

- Selected: the date *all the selected files, regardless of 
whether they have been rotated or not* will be changed to 
the moment of taking the photo, according to the EXIF 
metadata (jhead parameter -ft).

When the installer is finished you should be able to 
right-click any folder or a file with .jpg or .jpeg 
extension. For folders, you should see the menu items 
"Auto-rotate all JPEGs in folder" and "Auto-rotate all 
JPEGs in folder and in all subfolders". For JPEG files, you 
should see the menu item "Auto-rotate".

Clicking any of the menu items should bring up a console, 
showing the progress of the auto-rotating process and 
telling you to "Press any key to continue . . ." when 
completed.


Acknowledgements
---

Some might consider the optimal solution to not touch the 
file timestamps at all. Unfortunately with jhead this is 
currently not possible.

As of version 1.2, IPTC metadata will be left intact. 
Earlier versions deleted all IPTC metadata due to a problem 
in jhead.

From the jhead documentation: "After rotation, the 
orientation tag of the Exif header is set to '1' (normal 
orientation). The exif thumbnail is also rotated as of 
Jhead version 2.5. Other fields of the Exif header, 
including dimensions are untouched, but the JPEG 
height/width are adjusted. This feature is especially 
useful with newer digital cameras, which set the 
orientation field in the Exif header automatically using a 
built in orientation sensor in the camera."

In some cases, the context menu entries will not be 
directly under the right click menu, but in the submenu 
"Open with..." If you know how to force it directly in the 
context menu, please tell me. http://pilpi.net/contact/

From the jpegtran documentation: "The transpose 
transformation has no restrictions regarding image 
dimensions.  The other transformations operate rather oddly 
if the image dimensions are not a multiple of the iMCU size 
(usually 8 or 16 pixels), because they can only transform 
complete blocks of DCT coefficient data in the desired 
way." ... "For practical use, you may prefer to discard 
any untransformable edge pixels rather than having a 
strange-looking strip along the right and/or bottom edges 
of a transformed image.  To do this, add the -trim switch: 
-trim Drop non-transformable edge blocks."

The transformation is truly lossless - jhead is not using 
the -trim command line argument when calling jpegtran to do 
the actual rotating. With JPEG files coming straight out of 
a digital camera, I understand that the dimensions of the 
image dimensions usually are a multiple of the iMCU size, 
so no strange results should appear. Be careful when 
rotating "custom-sized" JPEGs though.

If you want to remove some menu items you already have 
installed, you need to uninstall the entire JPEG-EXIF 
autorotate via Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and 
then reinstall it with only the desired menu options 
selected.


Developer Notes
---

With version 1.2, the installer UI is getting a bit 
crowded. I couldn't be bothered to learn the relatively 
obscure NSIS scripting language well enough to create new 
option pages to move some of the options to. If you know 
how to achieve this or how to make the installer window 
bigger/resizable, please let me know :).

The compiling the installer with NSIS requires the 
InetLoad plugin, see credits below.

The 1.2 installer also uses some files, which will not be 
placed "as is" to the final installation directory
when using the installer: autooperate_ft.bat,
autooperatedir_ft.bat and autooperatedir_recursive_ft.bat
These can be acquired by installing the scripts with 
"Set the timestamp of selected files to EXIF date"
selected, and then renaming the three batch files to
the above names. Of course you will also need the default
versions autooperate.bat, autooperatedir.bat 
and autooperatedir_recursive.bat, which will be 
installed if you leave the above option unselected.
The only difference with these two sets of files is that
the _ft versions have the -ft command line parameter
passed to jhead, in order to set the file dates
according to EXIF metadata.

Includes jhead and jpegtran compiled for Windows. See the 
installation directory, for default a folder called 
"JPEG-EXIF_autorotate" in the "Program Files" (or 
equivalent in local language).

Todo
---
- A feature to close the rotating window automatically when 
finished rotating has been requested a couple of times.


Feedback 
---

See http://pilpi.net/
or send mail to Olli Savolainen:
firstname.lastname (at) pilpi.net


License
---

JPEG-EXIF autorotate is distributed as Public Domain 
(for the .nsi script, this readme and the batch files. 
Use it, edit it, distribute it if you wish, but please 
keep the credits below and contact me (see 
feedback above) if you do (any of these things =), so 
that I can keep track of any developments.

jhead seems to have a PD license too, but I'm not sure of 
jpegtran. 

If during the installation you chose to install the 
regenerate thumbnails feature, you also have 
mogrify.exe, which is a part of ImageMagick.
http://www.imagemagick.org/
ImageMagick is Copyright 1999-2006 ImageMagick 
Studio LLC, a non-profit organization dedicated to 
making software imaging solutions freely available.
See imagemagick_license.txt for the license of
Imagemagick.

Changelog
---

Version 1.2/2007-07-28 (Using NSIS 2.29)
 - Added an option to set the file dates to the date in
EXIF date field, which is supposed to be the photo taking
time/date. 
 - Updated to a jhead post-2.7 head revision copy, to
avoid resetting the IPTC data of rotated files. Thanks to 
Matthias Wandel, the author of jhead, for compiling it for 
me on 2007-07-25.
 - Updated the documentation (this file), added Developer 
Notes.
 - Tested the installer with wine on Ubuntu Linux. It 
works. Not that it would be any use ;).
 - Made JPEG-EXIF autorotate version number visible in 
the installer title bar.

Version 1.1/2006-05-06
 - Updated jhead to version 2.6, which means that now 
JPEG-EXIF autorotate also rotates the thumbnails inside
JPEG images
 - Added a "regenerate thumbnails" feature, to fix the 
thumbnails of images rotated by previous versions of 
jhead or JPEG-EXIF autorotate. This feature uses 
mogrify.exe from Imagemagick. mogrify.exe is over 4 
megabytes, so the installer now downloads it only if
the user selects it for installation.
 - Added the URL of the JPEG-EXIF autorotate website in 
the beginning and in the end of the rotating process.

Version 1.03/2006-01-05
 - Updated the package with the new documentation
 - Added a note in the beginning and in the end of the 
rotating process

Version 1.02/2004-05-21 
(just documentation - not yet updated in the installation 
file)
 - Added 'acknowledgements' section
    - noting that jpegtran changes timestamps
    - describing the true lossless rotation that JPEG-EXIF 
autorotate does 
    - and noting that the orientation EXIF tag is set to '1'
(normal orientation) after rotation.

Version 1.01/2004-04-24
 - Cleaned up the NSI file, fixed the name of the 
application to "JPEG-EXIF autorotate", fixed some minor 
bugs, fixed errors in this readme

Version 2004-04-22
 - First release, 1.0


Credits
---

-jhead by Matthias Wandel, 
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/

-jpegtran, http://sylvana.net/jpegcrop/ 
           http://jpegclub.org/jpegcrop/ 

-Registry edits and batch files originally by Thomas 
Bonfort, http://www.inrialpes.fr/movi/people/Bonfort/ 
(pages seem to have been removed)

-NSIS, Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, 
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/

-InetLoad plugin for NSIS, 
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/InetLoad_plug-in

-ImageMagick, Copyright 1999-2006 ImageMagick Studio LLC,
http://www.imagemagick.org

-This readme.txt, the installer script for NSIS (also 
included in the installer package) and major 
modifications to Thomas' batch files by Olli 
Savolainen, http://www.pilpi.net/