Intro
I still use my home-grown slideshow software based on Raspberry Pi, which is quite a testament to its robustness as it has been running with only minor modifications for many years now. one recent improvement has been my addition of being able to handle photos from recent iPhones which save photos in the new-to-me HEIC format. My original implementation only handles JPEGs and PNG file types, so it was skipping all our recent iPhone photos.
I figured there just had to be a converter our there which would even work on the RPi, which of course there was, heif-convert. But it has an oddity when it comes to rotation. It converts the HEIC to a jpeg, fine, but it rotates them, but it also leaves all the EXIF meta data, including the orientation meta data, as is. This in turn means display software such as fbi may try to rotate the picture a second time. Or at least that’s what happened to my software where one of my steps is an explicit rotate. That step was creating a double rotation.
So I needed a tiny program which left all the EXIF meta data alone except the rotation, which it sets to 0, i.e., do not rotate. Seeing nothing out there, I developed my own.
The details
Here is that script, which I call 0orientation.py:
#!/usr/bin/python3
# DrJ 10/24
# you need the exif package: pip install exif
# https://github.com/kennethleungty/Image-Metadata-Exif?tab=readme-ov-file
#https://exif.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
import sys
from exif import Image
file = sys.argv[1]
with open(file, 'rb') as image_file:
my_image = Image(image_file)
exif_flag = my_image.has_exif
print(exif_flag)
exifs = my_image.list_all()
print(exifs)
my_image.orientation = 0
with open('modified_image.jpg', 'wb') as new_image_file:
new_image_file.write(my_image.get_file())
Conclusion
I have shared how to overwrite just the orientation tag frmo a JPEG photo.
Reference and related
My photo frame software based on photos stored in a Google Drive