[Feature]: Image rotation

[Nonobis]

Feature detail

Add a feature for rotation of image

90 (left / right) / 180

Platform

Web

[jrasm91]

I believe there is an exif tag for this. Maybe we can look at adding/using it to implement this feature.

[Chacsam]

That would be a useful feature indeed

[dcrum]

I also think this may be a good feature to add. I suppose i could rotate manually with the stored files with ffmpeg but i dont know if immich would recognize them...

[GingerZero]

I also would find this feature immensely useful.

In my use case it only concerns picture that don't have an orientation tag in the metadata of the file. Some details...:
After having tested Immich with just my Phone's uploads, I was so satisfied that I decided to try and import all my old images since my family's first digital camera.
The older pictures unfortunately did cause some problems. Through the years, the images were stored in many different places and have been added to various programs. As a result, I have multiple issues, chief of which is the image rotation. Some portrait shots aren't rotated properly and a lot of older landscape photos (including digitized photos from the 80s) are inverted, so ground at the top and sky at the bottom of the image. While this would be expected behaviour for Australia, none of my photos are from Australia, so it clearly is a problem as it isn't reflective of reality.

[JasBogans]

I was thinking to use some ml model for image orientation detection (or maybe creating one), like with google photos in the utility section

[jrasm91]

There's already been a lot on this topic. For the immediate future the plan is to leave the original alone and write to a sidecar file instead.

[steve-builds]

I can see the value of not touching the originals at all, so that sounds good to me. Thanks!

[jrasm91]

Yeah and most tools support getting metadata from them as well so it should transfer to whatever tool or software you wanted to move to.

[aisbergde]

Storing in sidecar should be fine, because digiKam (or other software) should be able to detect this. And then these software can optionally write back into the assets, if required.

Does immich only check external libraries for changes, or does it check the default libraries too?

Same question for all changes in General: Is it a good way to change assets in default library outside immich (rotation, geo location, ...) and will immich detect these changes and reimport metadata and recreate thumbnails? Or is immich still on the trip, that no external changes should happen?

[NicholasFlamy]

#10136 is a dedicated feature request for this.

[bo0tzz]

Related: #5151

[steve-builds]

and #3271

[NicholasFlamy]

And #9575

[NicholasFlamy]

And now #11074 is merged.

Potential server implementation: #11658

[OlJohnny]

For anybody looking to work on this topic, there is a PR #9575 which implements this feature, but is looking for someone to continue the work.

This feature is available on mobile since release 1.111 with PR 10989

[bigntallmike]

This has been closed and merged into something else for those finding this now.
Unfortunately this rotation functionality is being delayed because "image editing" is much larger project than "please rotate this 90 degrees." Finding the originals on disk to do this with (for example) geeqie is a pain, and then re-scanning the images in immich so it notices feels very unnecessary.

[MastaBaba]

On mobile, I can indeed rotate an image. But the rotated version does not replace the original. In fact, re-saving the rotated image saves the new image to the phone. In my case, where immich is not how I manage my on-phone library, this does not return the rotated image to the immich library.

[CarlvO]

Is there any news on this? I know it can be done on the app but it is cumbersome. Being able to do this on the web would be so much easier. I've got literally hundreds of photos scattered around my collection that got imported with the wrong rotation and would like to be able to just go through them manually from the web client and fix them.

[gitaarik]

I just tried it in the App, but when you click "Edit" and then "Crop" and then "Rotate" and then click the checkmark, then you only have the option "Save to gallery", which will create a new photo, which will be ordered as latest. But then the original photo that has the wrong rotation is still in the same spot.

I would like to be able to rotate old photos, and that they stay in the same place in the timeline.

[Qhilm]

Yes, I would like to be able to edit in place (non-destructive, original should be retained on the Immich Server at least) in the Immich App and in the Web App. The original should not be visible anymore in the Immich App and the web app, but I should be able to revert to it with some menu item like "revert to original". "Show original" (without deleting the edits) would also be helpful, ideally with a keyboard shortcut or something like a long press on the image in the Immich App.

Lower priority / maybe not: changes would synchronise back to the native photo apps. Google Photos could do this at some point at least, cropping/rotating and some oher basic changes could sync back to the iOS native photos app. Some changes could not though, like some "enhancement+" (it was not called AI yet at the time I tried this).

[sdylewski]

I'm super interested i this also. I have a lot of old scanned imagers in my library and they're often in the wrong orientation!

[chyron8472]

In Google Photos, when you edit an image in this way, it then asks if you want to save as a copy. I think that, in Immich, if a new image is created, it should inherit the unmodified EXIF data that the original image had.

[Smicky007]

I'm using Immich primarily for a library of thousands of photos I have scanned in, which is a mine field for the wrong picture orientation. Because of the lack of this feature, I have had to delete and reload my image library because it's faster to just do them in Lightroom. Please do this feature!

[Qhilm]

Just as a note, there's a "replace with upload" feature in Immich I believe, no need to delete, that might make it a tad simpler.

I agree we need this, but for me it's dependent on having proper stacking across the board first.

[mareg]

I vote for this feature as well. I just uploaded 10000+ old photos from early 2000s, many of them don't have the orientation tag. It would be enough to simply have "rotate left" or "rotate right", that would save this orientation in the DB and recreated thumbnails accordingly. Nice to have would be if machine learning bit could try to guess, which image has wrong orientation, and "fixed" it on upload or re-scan.