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I've noticed many of the photos taken with my Canon IXUS point-and-shoot camera have out-of-synch EXIF rotation data.

Photos I took holding the camera sideways or upsidedown look right in File Explorer and the Windows 10 Photos app, but come out wrong when I upload them to Google Deep Dream.

GNU Gimp can detect this mismatch when loading such a photo, but it's a heavyweight app that takes a while to load on my little netbook:

What Gimp does

I'm looking for a lightweight tool to fix such images under Windows.

Must have

  1. Lightweight
  2. Commandline or GUI
  3. Both a) "Rotate image to match EXIF" and b) "Update the EXIF to match the image" options
  4. Not change selected files whose EXIF and image orientation already match
  5. JPEG image support is essential since it's universal on cameras

Nice to have

  1. Scan folder(s) and report all images with mismatched EXIF
  2. GUI tool shows images before and after making the changes
  3. Other image formats besides JPEG
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    jhead maybe? sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead or XnConvert: xnview.com/en/xnconvert
    – user14090
    Commented Oct 5, 2016 at 11:18
  • jhead looks to maybe only support 3a but not 3b, and only JPEG - but that's the most important image format for this. Your comment helped me see the deficiencies of my feature lists. Thanks. Downloading xnconvert now ...
    – hippietrail
    Commented Oct 6, 2016 at 2:17
  • jhead has commandline options -autorot and -norot which may be able to fit 3a and 3b. To actually perform the rotation it depends on a separate tool, jpegtran, which is usually on Linuxes but not Windows, but seems to be available.
    – hippietrail
    Commented Oct 6, 2016 at 2:26

2 Answers 2

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You could try IrfanView. It is fast, lightweight image viewer.

For viewing images, you can go to Properties/Settings, then JPG, then there is an option for "Auto-rotate image according to EXIF info". If you disable this option, then you can see which way round the images are.

For fixing the rotation, look at the JPEG Lossless Rotation feature (Shift+J). This has an option for auto-rotate, according to the EXIF data. If you choose the option for "none", I think it will just reset the EXIF orientation.

Note you can use the thumbnails view to select multiple images, then do a lossless rotation on all of them at once.

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My favorite for this task is the Faststone Image Viewer, the tool is able to auto rotate images and does it lossless. To rotate a whole folder of pictures, first select all pictures in the overview, then click Tools/JPEG Lossless Rotate/Auto-Rotate based on EXIF.

The tool itself is free for home users. It covers your requirements but for 3b, where I'm not sure what your requirement is.

Faststone Image Viewer auto rotate exif

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