The iPhone Camera Chip is UPSIDE DOWN
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 8/19/2016 1:00:00 AM
Have you ever wondered why some of the photos you take with your iPhone are upside down when you transfer them to your computer?
One of the weirdest problems with the iPhone is trying to figure out why some of the photos you've taken are right side up, while some of them are upside down. It doesn't seem to make sense. When you look at them on your iPhone, they look fine, but after browsing or editing them on your computer, you have to manually flip some of them. How can that be?
The trouble is, every camera has a natural orientation for the chip that actually records your photos, so whenever you take a picture, the fastest thing the camera can do is store the photo exactly as it came out of the chip. So, all your photos are stored in that one orientation, regardless of how you hold the camera when you take the picture. To compensate for this, the iPhone makes a notation of the actual camera angle in the hidden data inside the picture file. This puts the burden of flipping the image to whatever program or website you use to view or edit the photo.
Unfortunately, some programs and websites still ignore this information and the result is an upside down picture that you need to flip manually.
While you can argue that it's the fault of the software companies or websites to pay attention to the position information in the photo file, the fact is some major Apps from companies like Adobe, and Microsoft, and websites like Amazon still ignore the information leaving you to flip the files manually.
I did a very scientific test. I took 10 pictures with the buttons facing up, and 10 with the buttons facing down and loaded them into an App that just happens to ignore the orientation in the metadata. All 10 with the button up were upside down, and all 10 with the buttons down were perfect.
I blame Apple for this because the newer versions of iOS have a feature that allows people to use the volume buttons to take pictures, like a shutter button. This essentially means that Apple is encouraging people to hold their cameras with the buttons on top... which just happens to be the upside down position of the camera chip.
To me, the solution is simple. As long as Apple is encouraging people to hold their cameras with the volume buttons facing up, they should orient the camera chip to make that the default orientation. This would mean the only time your photos would still be upside down is when you take photos with the volume buttons facing down.
For what it's worth, even for an App that reads the orientation metadata, it means there is a slight performance hit because it needs to flip the image. This is why the iPhone itself doesn't just store the image in the correct way in the first place. Frames per second is very important when it comes to camera design, so all the files are a direct dump from the camera chip in it's natural position. I'm just suggesting they change the natural position so that even Apps that ignore the orientation will work... and that even the ones that do use the metadata will work faster because they won't need to flip the image.
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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