Glossary
Orientation tag
The orientation tag is the EXIF field telling a viewer which way up an image should be displayed.
Updated
Phone camera sensors have a fixed physical orientation, so a portrait photo is stored as a landscape image accompanied by a tag saying how far to rotate it. Viewers read the tag and rotate on display; the stored pixels never change.
Removing the tag without rotating the pixels is why stripped photos so often come back sideways. Nothing about the image changed, but the instruction telling software what to do with it is gone.
This is one of the fields worth keeping. It describes the picture rather than the photographer, and dropping it costs display correctness while protecting nothing.
Related terms
- ICC profile — An ICC profile is a colour description embedded in an image so that viewers reproduce its colours consistently.
- EXIF — EXIF is the metadata standard cameras use to record how, when and where a photo was taken, stored inside the image file itself.
- Lossless — Lossless means the image data comes out bit-for-bit identical to what went in.