Shot event in RAW...

[Terry Zorich]

Originally Posted by Richard Dickins

ACDSee has been auto rotating images for as long as I can remember*. Are you sure there isn't an option in the earlier ones to "[x] Autorotate" ?

In fact, there IS an "Auto Rotate" in ACDSee 6.0 (which is what I'm using on my server).

But here's how "Auto Rotate" works in ACDSee 6.0:
You must manually select all of the images that were shot in portrait orientation, then choose Batch Rotate, select the "Auto Rotate" button, toggle the "Apply to all selected images" option on, and then click OK. And then you get to WAIT, while the program processes each image file. In other words, the only thing that's "Auto" about it is that you don't have to specify WHICH direction to rotate the images (i.e. 90 degrees counterclockwise). Ironically, ALL my images need to be rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise (because it takes a really special person to shoot verticals with the shutter button at the bottom of the rig). In any case, the "Auto Rotate" feature doesn't even save me a single keystroke or mouse-click, and it takes exactly the same amount of time to rotate a given number of images as it does to use the "90 degrees counterclockwise" method.

BUT.....! I've just discovered that ACDSee Pro Photo Manager 8.1 (which I have installed on my office PC, but not on any of the six machines in my trailer) DOES have the option to display portrait-orientation images based on EXIF data. Perhaps I will investigate buying a volume license for their more basic Photo Manager program, which would presumably also have the feature I'm after.

[Richard Dickins]

Aha, that must be why I remember it for so far back.

I'm on ACDSee Photo Manager 2009 (not pro) and it autorotates fine. Is that a more expensive solution than 'Pro' 8.1 ?

Maybe the danger with 'pro'is that customer will start editing/destroying their images while you are not looking?

[Doug_Kerr]

Hi, Terry,

Great story. Sounds like you are well on top of all this.

For what it's worth, IrfanView Thumbnails will perform "lossless" rotation of JPEG images on a batch basis very quickly (and will discriminate based on the exif orientation indicator if you wish).

On my platform, with Windows XP and a 2.4 GHz processor, it rotates Canon 40D images (3888 x 2592 px) at a rate of about 1 per second.

[Terry Zorich]

Originally Posted by Doug_Kerr

For what it's worth, IrfanView Thumbnails will perform "lossless" rotation of JPEG images on a batch basis very quickly (and will discriminate based on the exif orientation indicator if you wish).

On my platform, with Windows XP and a 2.4 GHz processor, it rotates Canon 40D images (3888 x 2592 px) at a rate of about 1 per second.

This is similar to my (old) versions of ACDSee, although I think ACDSee takes a little longer than one second per. In any case, with two to three thousand images to process, even one second is too long. (2500 images x 1 second each = 2500 seconds = 41 minutes of non-stop processing, BEFORE we can begin sorting)

[Terry Zorich]

Originally Posted by Richard Dickins

I'm on ACDSee Photo Manager 2009 (not pro) and it autorotates fine. Is that a more expensive solution than 'Pro' 8.1 ?

Maybe the danger with 'pro'is that customer will start editing/destroying their images while you are not looking?

ACDSee Photo Manager 2009 looks like a viable solution. I'm resigned to the fact that I'm going to need to spend money to resolve this issue. I certainly don't need the pro version, and yes - the fewer options we give our customers for 'tinkering', the better. A simple, fast and inexpensive image viewer with as few options as possible would be ideal. (Any suggestions?)

However, I'm not worried about customers editing/destroying image files, as the viewing station (Windows) user accounts have only "read" permissions on the image files. There's at least ONE thing I have well under control!