Wednesday, October 06, 2004

GraphicConverter beta fixes OS X induced duplicate EXIF orientation tag

GraphicConverter beta release
context menu item to remove double orientation tags added

This is the 2nd or 3rd feature I've asked Thorsten Lemke about that he's added to GC. You don't get that kind of service from Photoshop! I hardly ever get the chance to send the guy money, since he asks for a pittance of an upgrade fee only once every few years.

One of the previous requests I had was for a quick way to create copies of images that were cropped for printing. Thorsten added a feature that makes quick work of chopping large numbers of images for making 4x6 and other print styles.

This new feature fixes a problem Apple inflicted on users of their Image Capture utility. In several versions of OS X the Image Capture utility duplicated the EXIF orientation tag while auto-rotating an image. So images ended up with the original tag plus an EXIF=1 (top left) tag. This confused some image editing and printing software. Basically Image Capture corrupted the JPEG EXIF header on cameras (Canon for example) that sensed image orientation and modified the orientation tag. Some versions of iPhoto tried to rotate the image a 2nd time and really mangled things.

Apple quietly fixed this in an OS X release, but they never released a utility to repair all the images with corrupted tags. Now there will be one with the next release of GC.

What a great piece of software. Please charge me an upgrade fee Thorsten!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thank goodness for Google. I ran across images with multiple orientation tags tonight, and went out to search for the "why" of how they got there. (I was wrong; I thought it was some old sorting software I used; didn't expect it to be an Apple issue.)

Thanks for the post! Though, GraphicConverter is having a hard time -- it can't deal with 68,000 jpegs at a time ;-)