Blush wine Emmentaler

[awakephd]

AC4U!

[Susan38]

And another c4u!  Thanks for the followup!

[cheesehead94]

I've been trying to post photos but am having some technical difficulties...hopefully I can soon!

[awakephd]

I've been trying to post photos but am having some technical difficulties...hopefully I can soon!

Difficulties getting the pictures uploaded, or difficulties with the results once they are uploaded?

Warning: lengthy treatise follows below. Feel free to treat as TL/DR!

There are a couple of common issues with uploading pictures to this and other forums. One is file size. This forum will actually accept a full-resolution, multi-megabyte picture, and will scale it on viewing, but that leads to a great deal of inefficiency, especially for anyone with slower internet - the full file has to upload and download, and then be scaled to a fraction of its full size to fit on the screen. Other forums I've seen will reject a file that is too large, and others will attempt to scale it, but do so badly. Generally I find a picture size of 1024 x 768 to be a good target.

The second issue is picture rotation. On any digital camera, when you take a picture, it is always stored physically in keeping with the physical characteristics of the device. To say that another way, when you rotate your camera or phone to take a picture, the pixels are stored based on the physical orientation of the image sensor, NOT on the intended orientation of the viewing. Thus, in terms of the actual storage of the image, it may be sideways or upside down to match how the camera or phone was held.

So why does the picture still show up correctly on your phone or camera or computer? Because in addition to the actual image, the device stores "metadata" that tells how the device was rotated when the picture was taken (as well as a bunch of other info - f-stop, flash settings, possibly gps location, optionally copyright info, etc.). When it is displayed, the image as physically stored is rotated as needed based on the metadata.

Unfortunately, most forums "strip out" the metadata when they upload a picture, probably because it could potentially contain personally identifiable data.  Without that metadata, however, the software doesn't know to rotate images as needed, so it just shows the image as it is physically stored. Some forum software will attempt to physically rearrange the image before storing it and before discarding the metadata, but not all ... and most forum software seems to have trouble handlinge files from certain digital image formats (pictures taken on Apple devices seem to be the most problematic).

It is possible to scale and/or physically rotate an image before uploading it to a forum. Unfortunately, in general it is tedious and time consuming. You have to load the picture into gimp or photoshop or what-have-you photo editing software, tell it to strip the metadata (not all software lets you do that, or not easily), and scale the image to the desired size, then save it back, making sure not to overwrite your original in case you want to keep the full-resolution version for printing or personal use. And you have to do all of these multiple steps one picture at a time.

For this reason, a few years ago I finally wrote a little program for Linux & Windows (and theoretically Mac--the software is built on a multiplatform foundation--but I don't have a Mac and haven't compiled it on that platform). This program allows selecting any number of picture files (or dragging & dropping them), setting the target resolution and how to handle rotation (defaulting to automatically detecting the rotation), and how/where to store the results (in a new directory, or with a suffix added to distinguish from the originals, or if you really, truly want to, overwriting the originals). In just a few seconds it converts a whole list of pictures.

I have found that I use this program all the time, not because I upload pictures to forums all that often (though I do use it for that purpose when I upload cheese pictures!), but because I serve as the designated family-and-friend photographer - a long, long way from a professional, but I have a decent camera and set of lenses, so I wind up taking a lot of pictures of weddings and special events. The problem then is how to share these with the family or friends who might like to have copies. Full resolution pictures generally take anywhere from 4-8 megabytes of storage, and my email server limits me to sending no more than 15 megabytes or so at a time - generally no more than 2-3 full-resolution pictures. No problem if I only have half-a-dozen to share ... but if I have 25 or 50 or more (which can easily be the case, even after culling out the duplicates and less-than-ideal pictures), it is a pain to try to send them out.

With the program I wrote, however, it is simple. I already organize my pictures using a separate folder for each event, so I just select all the pictures in the folder and drop them into the program. It saves my preferred target resolution, compression quality, and rotation settings; I just edit the destination folder to something convenient and click "Apply." A few seconds later, 500 megabytes of pictures has been has been saved as 5 megabytes of 1024x768 sized pictures which I can send in a single email. For posting on Facebook etc., these can be used as-is. If anybody wants full-resolution versions for printing or whatnot, they can let me know which specific pictures to send them individually. Voila!