Re: 2019 Madera Sugar Pine Explorations

Thanks for your efforts here, Dave!

As far as the 'sideways' photos, presumably you are taking those photos with a 'phone' style camera.

The "old" way of phones storing digital photos was to save the file in the same orientation that the device (phone/camera) was being held at the time. Sometimes that meant using CPU cycles (and battery power) to recompute the pixel locations to save the file. But . . . . the "new" way is to store the image without recomputing pixel locations to allow the camera to be ready for the next photo sooner. This also saves on battery power. Instead of saving the image with a "fixed" landscape/portrait orientation, the "new" way is to store the orientation as part of the EXIF data of the image.

That system works OK if the "post capture" processing (such as posting to the NGDF etc) also understands and respects finding the image orientation in the photo EXIF data. But the NGDF forum software is older, and doesn't look for image rotation in the EXIF data, so it simply orients the image the way the phone saved it.

If you want to change the orientation displayed (on a system that doesn't look at EXIF data), one way to do that is to rotate the image (in a photo editor, etc) and then save it rotated.

However, that can get tricky because the photo program might be respecting the EXIF data, or it might not - depending on the editor. So you may need to try out a couple of different editors to see which one works for your situation.

Note that if the sideways photo opens in the editor displayed "correctly", then its likely the editor is reading the EXIF data, and that editor may not be useful in actually saving the file in a rotated format.

As an alternative to using an editor on a local device, use an online free service. For instance, I used this tool:
[www.imgonline.com.ua]

to rotate your map:


(note that using that tool, I chose "zero" rotation to get it to display correctly)