Help! WordPress is showing photos sideways!
If you’re saying the phrase above, you’re not alone. In some cases, WordPress will display photos sideways from the orientation they were orignally created. This happens most often with photos from iPhones or other smartphones. If WordPress is showing your iPhone or other photos sideways, here’s what’s going on and what you can do.
WordPress Photos Sideways? It’s an EXIF Thing
You’re probably familiar with the fact that images can contain metadata – bits of information like keywords, the GPS coordinates where an image was made, or copyright information. The image’s orientation (vertical or horizontal aspect) can also be stored in this metadata. Some smartphones and cameras will store the orientation in the EXIF metadata, and unfortunately WordPress doesn’t currently read that metadata.
So while your camera or phone knows that the picture was taken vertically or horizontally, and it will display it as such, WordPress doesn’t know that and so the image might appear sideways from the orientation desired.
What To Do About It
There are a couple options:
- use a plugin such as Fix Image Rotatation to automatically fix the rotation as you upload the images to WordPress. (Note: I previously recommended a plugin called Image Rotation Fixer but it no longer works with current versions of WordPress).
- use an image editor that will remove the orientation metadata – this can be involved (here’s the process for Photoshop)
Yes, WordPress Core Developers Know About This
This has been a known issue with WordPress since at least July 2010, when this ticket was opened to note the problem. There have been updates, but no ideal solution seems to have been found or proposed.
Hopefully we’ll see a patch in WordPress core to respect the EXIF rotation, but in the meantime you can use one of the solutions above if WordPress is showing your photos sideways.
I am flipping the image in media and it appears upright, but when I use the image in a post it still is sideways.
Sadly it appears this doesn’t resolve the issue… I’ve updated the article. Looks like the only surefire way to do it is with the plugin referenced, or with an image editor that removes the orientation metadata.
If i take a pic and upload it straight via the app it appears sideways. However if i take the pic, open it up on the phone and hit edit, rotate the pic 4 times so it ends up back to the same position then save. Then upload to via wordpress and it seems to work.
Hi Mark, thank you so much for posting that 4x rotating tip. It totally works!
Mark, thanks. I also tried rotating it using Microsoft picture manager…when I uploaded back the photo on the website, it worked.
Is there a way to fix photos already uploaded? My photos show up with the correct orientation on my iPad, but sideways on a laptop or desktop. I uploaded the plugin you recommended for future posts, but is there a simple way to fix previous posts?
I have this same problems. Images look normal when viewed on a Mac desktop, iphone or Android phone but are sideways on a PC. Any advice on what to do?
You can now edit the orientation on each picture in Attachment Details
Where can you do that? I have looked all over. It appears correctly under Media – except when you click on “View attachment page” (and in my blog post) it is flipped.
Thank you. This had been driving me crazy for months. Usually, I’d crop the excess off photos to “trick” WordPress. But this one image actually needed to be upload as-is, because I got lucky with the shot. Thanks again.
You can open the image in pixlr.com and save it back to your computer. No EXIF data gets saved.
You can also open it in photoshop or photoshop elements, copy the layer and rotate only the top layer, then flatten the image again.
Does iOS Images Fixer work only on iOS images? Do you have a recommendation for Android systems? Thanks!
Try https://wordpress.org/plugins/fix-image-rotation/.
The suggested plugin you mentioned “ios images fixer” hasn’t been updated in 2 years, and it doesn’t work anyway. There is a newer, up-to-date plugin called “fix image rotation”, but it also doesn’t work for me.
Apparently this fix will be released in WordPress 5.3!
https://make.wordpress.org/core/2019/10/11/updates-to-image-processing-in-wordpress-5-3/