[Spock]

I just tried importing the above photos into a friend's 2 week old high end laptop. The images were still not oriented correctly in his image viewer.

[falconeye]

Here are some resized images as they appear when downloaded to my computer

Of no help. But there isn't any problem anyway, cf. below ...

I would have thought Pentax would have designed the autorotation to work with Windows. (?)

2 week old high end laptop. [...]

Spock,

I am getting it now. So, please don't feel offended if I explain a thing which you may know already ...

There is no such thing like "autorotate" in the world of image formats.

Previously, the only way to rotate an image was to alter the pixel data.


Some vendors have started to embedd an orientation sensor into their cameras and needed to store the flag somewhere. So, they choose to create a new EXIF tag (EXIF is created by Japanese camera makers anyway ...).

Fortunately enough, most makers agree on a single EXIF tag to store the orientation. Nevertheless, the tag "Orientation" is not standard because EXIF is no standard.

So, don't expect support from the operating system. Why do you? Why do you blame Pentax? Why didn't you educate yourself before complaining? Pentax did what they could by writing the "Orientation" tag in camera and reading it in PPL.

Here is more material about the topic:
ImpulseAdventure - JPEG / Exif Orientation and Rotation

As you can see, Adobe software supports the flag as well.

As for ACDSee, I am seeing this:

if you let ACDSee rotate pictures automatically when viewing them in the browser view, you see a little blue icon left of the thumbnail preview. If you click on the thumbnail, the picture is rotated permanently (lossless) and the Exif orientation information is updated the way you want it to

Therefore, I suggest you consult your ACDSee manual ...


Side note ... yes, I am loosing my patience here.

[Marc Sabatella]

With ACDSee, there is an option to control whether it honors the EXIF rotation field or not. During import, set the "auto rotate" option (and once you select it, it shoud "stick", so that would be a one-time only thing". For images already imported without that option, you can rotate them manually. Either select just the ones that need it and do a batch rotation left or right, or you can select *all* images and do a batch rotation according to the EXIF. Depending on how you imported the images, it's also possibly simply selecting everything and running Rebuild Thumbnails and Metadata would do the trick.

Anyhow, ACDSee is not lacking in these capabilities - its just a question of using it properly.

[falconeye]

Anyhow, ACDSee is not lacking in these capabilities - its just a question of using it properly.

Yeah, just like I wrote.

However, if Spock didn't confuse things, there is a chance that images autorotated by ACDSee make PPL crash

[Spock]

Thanks for the advice everyone. It seems the mistake I made was assuming that the K7 would rotate images and save them to negate the need for me to do it manually. I realise now that it doesn't really rotate the image in the way I have been doing it manually since I switched to digital in 2004.

By way of explanation, my version of ACDSee dates back to 2003 and doesn't appear to have the ability to sense image orientation.

Part of the confusion also stems from the fact that when my wife showed some pics to my sister and brother in law he placed the SD card in his laptop and rotated a few of the images (something I was I was unaware of) and those images caused "Pentax Digital Camera Utility 4" to crash and provided the confusing orientation data in PhotoME.

Sorry to have confused and frustrated people who tried to help me in this thread!

One thing that is still not clear to me is the way PhotoME describes image orientation. For example the following images are described as:


90 degrees CW (left/bottom)


90 degrees CCW (right/top)

I understand 90 degrees CW or CCW - but isn't 'left/bottom' and 'right/top' the same thing?

And the following image is described as 0 degrees (top/left)



What does 'top/left' mean in this case?

[falconeye]

I understand 90 degrees CW or CCW - but isn't 'left/bottom' and 'right/top' the same thing?

You probably didn't care to click onto the link named "ImpulseAdventure - JPEG / Exif Orientation and Rotation" in my reply #17 above. It contained an answer to this question.

Namely, there are 8 orientations but 0,90CW,90CCW,180 if used alone would only be able to denote 4 of them.

[Spock]

You probably didn't care to click onto the link named "ImpulseAdventure - JPEG / Exif Orientation and Rotation" in my reply #17 above. It contained an answer to this question.

Thanks, I must have missed that. Very interesting reading.

[japafu]

I talked with Pentax and they stated there wasn't enough interest to develop the remote assistant software for the K7 their "flagship". I think there was interest but everyone just expected that it would come with it. So if there are enough requests then they will go ahead and do it. To make requests just call tech support and ask to make a software request. It is a bother to do astrophotography without it. And most third party software do not include Pentax.