Rotated Photos Mysteriously in InDesign

Question

A client sent me a 24 page InDesign working file that another designer created. I opened the file, added bleeds, a person's signature, and created a new pdf for my client's commercial printer. There were about 265 linked photos in the document. I uploaded the pdf back to Dropbox for my client to proof. She told me that a number of photos were rotated. I didn't touch any photos, so I did not proof each page's content. I know that when you replace rotated photos, the new photos will be rotated. her designer say that the photos were on in her working file. When I look at the working file, several of the photos are rotated. I am on a MAC with updated software, however I don't know if the designer is working on a MAC or PC.

Does anyone have any idea what could have happened? I have been a designer for a lot of years and have never had this happen before.

Thank you.

Colin Flashman · Answer

Before I go into what I suspect may be the issue, I concur with Laubender and that is - when the document was first opened, were any links updated?

I have a feeling it may be something to do with this issue as I've encountered the following problem before: Fixing image orientation

Hidden in Bridge and many digital cameras is a tag called tiff:Orientation and it can be found by going to the File Info by right-clicking on an image in Bridge. Let's use this image as an example:

Let's look at this mysterious tag by clickong on File Info... (I've redacted the other stuff to avoid confusion)

The line in question is the <tiff:Orientation>1</tiff:Orientation>

Close out of this for a second, click on the image again and let's rotate the image to the left using Bridge's rotate tools:

Again, let's get info on this image in Bridge like we did with the landscape version

Now the tag changes to <tiff:Orientation>8</tiff:Orientation>

Each tag corresponds to how a digital camera was held when the photo was taken, and it looks like Bridge tries to mimic this. There is more info on this tag here: Exif Orientation Page

Let's go back to the landscape image, rotate it in photoshop 90 degrees to the left and save it with another name. Let's see its specs in Bridge:

While the image is in portrait orientation and should be the <tiff:Orientation>8</tiff:Orientation>, it is actually <tiff:Orientation>1</tiff:Orientation>, so Photoshop does not mimic this behaviour.

This is all fascinating stuff, but what's the point? Well, place the bridge-rotated image and photoshop-rotated image into an InDesign file and note what happens when selecting on the image with the white arrow tool, particularly the orientation in the transform panel. I haven't done any post-rotation to these images after they were placed - this is immediately after the images were placed.

Note that the bridge picture has a 90 degree rotation, while the one rotated in photoshop does not. It looks as if the bridge rotated image is still natively landscape, but ID knows to look for the orientation tag and rotate it accordingly.

It's possible that the issue lies here - I think that when packaging the file, the resulting packaged copy has lost these <tiff:Orientation>8</tiff:Orientation> tags. That said, when I packaged this test file and looked at the file info on both pics (and opened the ID file to see if the image rotated by accident) I couldn't get it to fault, but I'm running MacOS10.14.4 with IDCC2019 14.0.2.

If you have access to the files you worked on AND the files you packaged, compare them in bridge and see if there was any difference in these rotation values.

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