Images rotate 90 degrees when placing a Word file into InDesign.

[danielg98770948]

I have a Word file that has some images in it that were taken with my phone camera.  I rotated them so they were portrait instead of landscape with Windows image viewer and then put them into the Word document.  Everything looked good and then I placed the file into InDesign and they all rotated back to their original orientation.  The actual image files are in the correct orientation though, even when I open them with Photoshop.  Why is this happening, how to I fix it and how can I prevent it in the future?

[Jongware]

Such rotations are stored in image metadata, and apparently Word interprets this correctly but InDesign does not. Also, a lot of image manipulations in Word are not translated when importing a DOCX into InDesign -- stuff like cropping and converting to grayscale. (It might be that such metadata rotations are internally converted by Word to their own kind, but the end effect is the same.)

But a far superior workflow does not involve importing such images through Word. You are better off linking the original files through InDesign. Not only will this make your InDesign file smaller, but also more stable. A lot of "damaged files" are caused by including excessively large and/or numerous image files wholesale. Linking instead is faster, safer, and you can always edit the original right away.

[Laubender]

Hi Daniel,

what you can test:

Place a rotated image from your phone in InDesign.

Does it place unrotated?

If yes, open it with PhotoShop and save it with a new name.

Or change at least one pixel in PhotoShop and overwrite the original ( perhaps changing a pixel is optional ).

Only after done in PhotoShop import the images to Word before you place the Word file in InDesign.

Regards,
Uwe