Cities Digital's Tech Bite: Laserfiche Rotates Photos from Mobile Devices in Portrait Mode

The Cities Digital Support team has recently worked with a customer who had an interesting experience with pictures taken from a mobile device being rotated when saved into Laserfiche.

When a picture is taken in portrait mode (the orientation of the device is vertical), using an Android or iOS device, EXIF data is collected about that image. The EXIF data is information about the orientation of an image. The picture can then viewed in a windows viewer, where the images look correct. The Windows Viewer application takes into consideration the orientation of the picture (the EXIF data) and automatically corrects the viewer for display purposes.

A picture taken in portrait mode on a mobile device and imported into Laserfiche on the other hand is rotated. Laserfiche does not take the (EXIF data) orientation of an image into consideration.

Fig. 1 - Picture taken on a mobile device in portrait mode.

Fig. 2 - Picture portrait mode imported to Laserfiche.

A picture taken in landscape mode (the orientation of the device is horizontal), using a mobile device and imported into Laserfiche will behave as expected with no rotation.

Fig. 3 - Picture taken on a mobile device in landscape mode.

Fig. 4 - Picture in Landscape mode imported into Laserfiche.

Currently Laserfiche does not have a way to stop portrait oriented pictures from automatically rotating upon import. The Cities Digital Support Team has a few solutions, if you are encountering this issue.

1. Manually rotate the picture after it has been imported into Laserfiche.

2. Utilize Quick Fields to process the pictures and rotate them through a session.

3. Take pictures from your mobile device that you are going to import into Laserfiche in Landscape mode.