I find that taking photos with my Android phone to immediately upload into Facebook to be a great convenience.
It’s easy! Take your photo with the Camera app, select your new photo by tapping it’s icon in the upper right corner while still in the Camera, or selecting your photo in the Gallery, and then tap Share. From there, you can share the photo via Facebook, Email, Twitter, etc.
Unfortunately, sometimes the uploaded photos are rotated incorrectly when sharing with Facebook, usually portrait photos are rotated to landscape mode. The work-around for this problem is to first select to Crop your photo in the Gallery.
You can resize the crop box back to the original size of the image, effectively not losing any image information, and then click Save. A duplicate of your original image will be created that you can now upload to Facebook – it will appear with the correct rotation.
Wow. Thanks so much for posting this. This is the only post I could find that solves the issue. You have saved me the step I used to have to do, which was uploading to a desktop to rotate the picture before posting. I really hope the Android 2.1 update includes a simpler way of rotating a picture for this purpose.
Unfortunately the issue of portrait mode photos sometimes being incorrectly rotated to landscape when uploading to Facebook remains with Android 2.1 and the latest version of the Facebook applet. The kludge of cropping the photo still works. I’ll update this post (and twitter) if I ever find a better workaround.
This seems like a big flaw in the design of photos on Android, because this problem isn’t confined to sharing with Facebook, the image itself can be oriented wrong with no way to fix it or even really notice it on the phone itself. The method of cropping the photo can fix the problem, but it has to be done on a photo-by-photo basic before sharing, and is very unwieldy compared to easy fixes on a computer. But still, it works, and I thank you again for the tip.
Another unfortunate consequence to this work-around is that the re-saving re-encodes the JPG, causing loss of image quality. There are plenty of lossless rotating algorithms out there and it’d be nice if Cool Iris incorporated it into the native rotation.
Thanks for posting the hack though! Better than nothing.
I hope they fix this in the future as its a right pain
Stumbled onto this after a google search. Just wanted to post something I found. I have the same problem. If I take a photo with my phone vertically it will share horizontally (Buzz, Facebook, MMS, etc…). HOWEVER, if I upload the photo to Dropbox via the Dropbox app it will be rotated correctly. This really surprised me.
Thanks for letting us know about this hack. Sounds like the camera isn’t saving the exif rotation information correctly, yet Gallery’s editing tool *will* save it correctly (or, more likely, it’s able to read the exif rotation information correctly, then stripping it when saving the new image).
This is a good tip.
It’s Facebook’s app that fails to read the exif information, not the camera. The facebook app fails at this on my wife’s iphone app as well. Most of the image editing software I use on my Android reads the exif correctly. When the file is saved again, the app that saved the image is saving a new image. Facebook’s apps needed an update last year.
I was bummed about this as well with my Droid Pro with Android 2.2. However, I found that if I use the e-mail address I’m assigned by Facebook’s mobile service, they upload fine. If I use the Photo Sharing to facebook from my phone, they upload incorrectly. So if you haven’t gotten that e-mail address from facebook for uploading mobile photos, try that. It seems to work fine for me.
Facebook may be ignoring EXIF for other reasons. Since this is apparently known, why doesn’t Android just rotate the image before uploading it to FB? Be proactive! This is Google for God’s sake.
Great hack. Thanks for posting.
rockin work around. first hit on google. ahhhh. thank you!
You can add to discussion of this issue at http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=15072 if you want to get it fixed
2012…new phone…same problem! Thank you so much for posting!