Photo orientation on report

I can add now, that sometimes, the picture is printed vertically as it should, but other times it is rotated and printed horizontally. Why ? 

Hi Laurence,

Could you let us know which standard report and which picture are you referring to?  Any screenshots may help to understand the issue.  It may be related to some properties of the particular picture control in the report layout.

Regards,

Susie

Hi Susie,

Yes, of course. When I’m talking about standard report I mean the “Service Order Report” for instance.

As you can see below, in the checklists section, pictures are displayed horizontally, but just after, I put the scrrenshot of the picture attachment, which is vertical. 

How is this managed ? What can we do to ensure the picture will be printed in the good orientation ?

Thank you

Hi Laurence,

I have checked the report layout design and there is no property to set the picture orientation.  The image file should be displayed according to the actual orientation of the photo.

I recommend you log a ticket to your local support team and they should be able to investigate further.

Regards,

Susie

Hi Laurence,

I ran across something on the web which might help.

There is orientation data in Exif. It defines how the raw pixel data should be transformed before being displayed (rotation, but also potentially flipping on either axis).

For a JPEG image with Exif, the 'easy' way to rotate the image is just to update the Exif info. Of course this requires the viewer to honour that rotation information.

The more expensive way (and potentially lossy) is to physically rotate the image data.

If you have an EXIF editor perhaps you can update the orientation of the picture?  Or perhaps the EXIF in the photo is being stripped by a process in the phone’s software to protect information if one was used to create the picture.

Hi Phil,

Thank you for your answer. Do you know how we can control this parameter within Alliance ?

This attribut “Orientation” is set automatically, depending on….what ? 

Thank you

Laurence

Hi Laurence,

I did not indicate there was a possibility to configure this as an option in Alliance and Susie already indicted she could not find one.  My message was to point out that the underlying MS technology which is handling the assembly/presentation (this is at a lower level than Alliance) may be reading the EXIF to see how to display the data.

My suggestion is to get a tool to read the EXIF of a file that is having a problem and see what kind of data is stored within it.  I don’t have a direct solution for you but was offering a suggestion based on what I know.

It was just a thought.

OK, thank you Phil, got it.

Indeed I’ve found a tool and could see that for some unknown reason, some pictures have the attribute orientation set to “rotate 90”.

I’m surprised nevertheless that the attachment is open vertically, while the picture is printed horizontally.

Hi Phil,

Following up on this topic, customer is unhappy with this and would like a integrated solution.

Arguing that some other tools are able to manage that, it will be highly appreciated if you can set up a solution.

Hi Laurence,

You will need to log a ticket for this.  I only mentioned the tool to identify where this was coming from and not as a solution as was clearly stated above I did not have a direct solution.

Please provide all the steps, Android version, Mobile Edge version, etc. in the ticket.

Hi Phil,

Coming back on this ticket. 

As mentionned previously, sometimes, the photo in the report is mistakenly oriented.

Based on your tips (attributes on photos), we’ve been able to find a method called RotateFlip that enables us to adjust the photo's orientation.

However, to properly orient the photo, we will require the initial angle of orientation. Do you have any suggestions or a script that can help us determine this information?

Thank you

Laurence

Hi Laurence,

I am sorry but I am not aware of anything that inspects the photos for the initial rotation angle provided by the tools taking the picture on the mobile phones.  Camera photo processes are managed by the OS of the phones themselves.  Doing a bit of searching via the internet, I found the following:

https://neededapps.com/tutorials/how-to-use-exif-metadata-to-fix-image-orientation/

Here it mentions:

It is common to have images in portrait instead of landscape. You should know that the orientation of an image does not depend only on pixels. Most image viewers display images according to EXIF metadata, particularly the EXIF:Orientation tag. In this article, we will see how to use the MetaImage metadata editor to correct the orientation using the EXIF:Orientation tag.

Not being something I normally am involved, I believe there is an orientation tag in the EXIF photo information but how this is used or what type of data, I do not know.