Robert L Krawitz (rlk@xxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
[Exif orientation tag]
> The obvious question is: if the rotation information isn't important,
> why does the camera even bother with it, as opposed to doing the
> rotation inside the camera? Why does EXIF even have a rotation tag if
> it's useless?
Good question. Actually I have wondered quite a lot about that already.
Why the fuck doesn't a camera with an orientation sensor store the Jpeg
in the proper orientation (quite cheap from a computational POV, just
shuffle some coefficients around) and stores an *absolute* orientation
tag in EXIF.
Storing a JPEG that looks wrong in 100% of all non-exif-aware image
viewers is just stupid IMHO.
> One reason that comes to mind is to study the lighting after the fact;
> knowing what the original rotation was can be helpful in some cases.
This is however not a good reason to store a tag relative to the image
data.
My best guess is some kind of vendor lock in ("you need to use our
proprietary tools to get properly oriented images from our camera") but
of course using a common standard for this task is kind of nonsense as
well :)
So no, I don't see a good reason to not rotate the images already in the
camera and e.g. store absolute information on the camera orientation.
Bye,
Simon
--
simon@xxxxxxxx http://simon.budig.de/
