Tech Forum

When I upload pictures for my ward directory, they all appear in "landscape" format, regardless of how they were taken or how they are formatted prior to uploading. In other words, all of the pictures of individuals that were taken in "portrait" mode are presented "sideways" or rotated 90 degrees on lds.org. Is there no way to rotate them back so that they appear correctly?

dbj1954 wrote:When I upload pictures for my ward directory, they all appear in "landscape" format, regardless of how they were taken or how they are formatted prior to uploading. In other words, all of the pictures of individuals that were taken in "portrait" mode are presented "sideways" or rotated 90 degrees on lds.org. Is there no way to rotate them back so that they appear correctly?

My guess is that the way your camera takes pictures, the photos are indeed in a landscape orientation, but contain metadata (EXIF) that specifies that the image is to be rotated. If that's the case, then it would appear that the LDS.org image uploader doesn't honor that setting in the metadata.

Your only option then would be to use some photo editing software to rotate the image manually before uploading. That may be a bit confusing, since your photo editing software is likely to present such images in portrait mode, because it will honor that setting. But generally if you rotate the image to be landscape, save it, and then rotate it back to be portrait, it will truly be saved in portrait format, without that metadata setting.

aebrown wrote:But generally if you rotate the image to be landscape, save it, and then rotate it back to be portrait, it will truly be saved in portrait format, without that metadata setting.

This requires some experimentation. Sometimes the save is not necessary. Other times, the photo editor may "rotate" by changing the tag rather than the photo. But it's a good start in searching for a solution.

Thanks for the suggestions! I used Photoshop Elements to rotate the pictures to landscape format, then back to portrait again, and saved. It worked!

Over a year ago the church had a new version of the Directory in beta that would allow you to rotate photos once uploaded. For reasons unknown, this project was delayed (see https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.ph ... 38#p100597). We haven't heard anything more about this project since then.