Digital Light & Color

I had to deal with a pile of images to prepare for loading up to a tablet.
I like to have the pictures as big as possible on the tablet (who doesn't ? ...), and i like to have the auto rotation set to "off" on the tablet, makes me crazy when the pictures always rotate when the tablet gets around for viewing.
So I process all the images so that the longer side is horizontal (aka Landscape orientation), so they all show up in maximum size on the tablet, and for portrait oriented images the tablet itself can be rotated.
Would it be possible and would other find it useful too to have a addition to the Rotate Widget to automatically rotate a image so the longer side is either vertical or horizontal, selectable clockwise or anticlockwise direction?
One problem that could occur is when one has images that need rotation in both directions, either from different people that rotate the camera different, or in some cases where it's more practical to rotate the camera in the other direction as normal. But i can't think of a way to detect that reliable in a automatic way, and should not be that many cases so it should be managable to select these by hand.

What do you think about it ?

My first thought is that perhaps there is a tablet slide show app with a display option to show images aligned with the display. If so, that would solve the problem. You could select 'don't rotate screen' option in the tablet and then display the images, rotating the tablet as needed.

If the above is not possible, you can easily rotate images in Picture Window. Rotation is a right click option in the Browser and Workflow. (It was used much more frequently in the days images came from scanned negatives.) The function operates on selected images. So you could select all images that need rotation to the left, rotate them and then to the right and rotate them. After loading them to your tablet, you would have to rotate them back. (Alternately I suppose you could make copies of the images in a separate folder and just delete the folder.)

Kiril

Thanks Kiril, thats the way I do it now.
I was just wondering if the process could be automated, when dealing with a couple of 100 of images it's kind of tedious to rotate by hand.

Dieter,

The issue that I see in rotating all images to landscape and then saving them is that the operation is one-way. The operation destroys information and it is then no longer possible to distinguish landscape and portrait images, except manually. Would that be a problem in your intended application?

Kiril

Kiril,

When process images for tablet or phone use I have them as separate files anyway, I resize them to double the pixel size of the tablet, sharpen them quiet heavily, convert to sRGB, save them as JPEG.
So the "originals" (processesed images) are never touched.
There are more informations that can not be retrieved when processing a 16 bit TIFF in ProPhotoRGB to a resized JPEG in sRGB, so I would not consider losing the orientation to be a problem.