Image Rotation: what am I missing

[moving this to the "migrating to gallery 2" category]

I'm finally upgrading from G1 to G2. There's a lot of things I like, and some warts, but this in particular has got me stumped.

First, is there a way to rotate images other than:

1) select "Edit Photo" from the dropdown
2) click over to the "Modify Photo" tab
3) press the correct rotation button
4) wait for rotation
5) click back on the album link at the top of the page
6) search for next photo to rotate
7) go back to #1

?

This is very tedious if you have a lot of pictures to go through. In Gallery 1.5.x, it's still not great, but it's:

1) select "Rotate/Flip"
2) window comes up; pick rotation
3) wait for rotation and window refresh
4) select next photo to rotate
5) go back to #1, but the rotate window is already open so it's pretty quick

Not a whole lot better, but two more steps is a lot when you're going through 100 photos. Plus since the window stays open, you can put it in a convenient spot on the screen and just click on the exact same place.

I understand that there's no bulk rotation, but is there some sort of shortcut I'm missing?

Second, it appears that the rotation isn't lossless a la jpegtran, but instead uses imagemagick to rotate and reencode. I see there's an option to always do this to a copy rather than the original -- but then, I'd have to track down the original if I wanted a non-degraded version.

The first thing is an annoyance (albeit a big one -- does everyone else have a Canon camera with a rotation sensor or something? What's the rest of the world to do?), but the second is, well, something I take for granted.

I don't mean to be pissy, as clearly Gallery 2 has a lot going for it. But, as far as I can see, the best option at this point is to upload my pictures to Gallery 1, rotate, and then migrate them to Gallery 2 -- every time I want to add a new batch. Please tell me there's a better way!

you're aware that all images are autorotated when they are added to g2, iff the the image has exif information about the orientation. note that most modern digital cameras add this information automatically.

this feature was added to g2 after g2.1.2. it's in the current svn version / nightly snapshots.

nothing in g2 uses jpegtran yet. it uses the toolkit with the top priority for the rotate operation for the given mimetype.
once you enable your jpegtran module, it will use that for jpegs.

jhead is used in the netpbm module to preserve exif information on opertations.
the exif module doesn't use jhead. it only uses a php based exif parser.

your claim that only canan adds this orientation information is a little confusing.
how come this auto-rotation feature was in gallery 1 maybe 2 years ago and it was much requested at that time?
my assumption that most cameras add this information was based on this fact, on nothing else. also, i've seen it in action at friends.

Is there any option for those of us who upgraded to 2.2RC1 but bulk imported everything *and* forgot to set the auto-rotate feature on before I imported them? I am sifting through 13,000 pics rotating, and the manual process is tedious.

I know it's a corner case, but I thought I would ask.

I have tried rotating the originals on the backend via jhead -autorot, and this fixes the files, but then confuses G2.2RC1 (all images after I man-handle them are broken img links).

I'm not aware of that as my installation:

Gallery version = 2.2.1 core 1.2.0.1
PHP version = 4.4.0-3ubuntu2 apache2handler
Webserver = Apache/2.0.54 (Ubuntu) DAV/2 PHP/4.4.0-3ubuntu2
Database = mysqlt 4.1.15-Debian_1-log, lock.system=flock
Toolkits = ArchiveUpload, Exif, Getid3, LinkItemToolkit, NetPBM, Thumbnail, Gd

doesn't autorotate. So I need a bulk or selective modify method also.

As far as I'm aware, all medium-priced-and-up dSLRs have rotation sensors which apply this information automatically. Pentax K100D doesn't; not sure about Nikon D40. Canon and Panasonic point and shoot digital cameras do too. I don't think any other digicams do, but almost all of them have an interface for rotating images in-camera.

Since Gallery doesn't have a convenient bulk-rotation module (unless someone wrote one while I wasn't paying attention), I find it *much* easier to go through all the images on the camera and rotate the ones that need it as a step before copying them to my computer. In both my Olympus and Fuji cameras, this doesn't remap the image but just applies the exif rotation tag.

Hope this helps.

You mean, if the rotation information is already there in the file, right?

'Cause if it isn't, it's still very tedious. Hence my tip.

I dunno about most people.

Gallery is a very powerful program, and I want to use it as my one-stop photo management application, not just as a final publication interface. I dump the pictures off the camera and upload them to an "unsorted" non-public folder in gallery. Then I sort and publish them from there, and redownload and post-process if necessary. (In general, I don't have the time.)

That way, all my images are on my server, nicely backed up. I don't have to worry about having multiple applications and multiple storage locations. I think if you check around, this is fairly common.

Shrug. You apparently consider your desktop system your "authoritative" computer. I don't keep anything of value on any desktop system, and instead keep everything important on the server, which has redundant disks, good power and AC, real backups, etc.

Gallery works great for this, whether you think it's "sketchy" or not.