Pete's Log: SharePoint Image Previews and Exif Data
Entry #2222, (SharePoint, Work)(posted when I was 44 years old.)
Most phones (and perhaps digital cameras too) save camera orientation info in the Exif metadata, so that image viewers can properly rotate the image and show it to you in the right orientation. Some image viewers don't know or care about the metadata, though, so you end up seeing the image sideways.
Internet Explorer was one such program. Since none of our users have IE anymore, though, I thought the days of dealing with that pain were mostly behind us. Although one stubborn culprit is Outlook - if somebody's profile picture has rotation metadata, Outlook will show it sideways.
Today I ran into another one, again a Microsoft product: SharePoint (at least SharePoint 2016, I haven't tested other versions). If you upload pictures into a SharePoint picture library, it will generate scaled down thumbnail images. But it strips all the metadata. So when you're looking at the actual images, they all look right, but if you look at the thumbnails, any rotated images are now sideways.
As usual, the fix seems to be to strip the metadata, manually rotate the picture to the right orientation, and then upload it. Sigh.