Photos appear sideways on mobile

Depending on your image processing software there are two ways of “rotating” an image:
– Modifying a tag in the image meta data that describes the correct rotation. This is usually done by smart phones and cameras who have a sensor to save an indication of the image rotation at time of shooting the image.
– Actually rearranging all the pixels of the image and saving it as new image. This is how proper editing tools work, e.g. Photoshop, but also the Windows image preview.

Both variants can also be mixed, for example having the image itself rotated 90 degree to the right, but with the meta information to rotate 90 degree to left, evening it out again.

Now my guess is, that you used – intentionally or not – the first method, because if and how the metadata is followed depends on the client.

Also, your ongoing mobile issues even after rotating in wordpress might be just a caching problem. Clear the cache of your phone browser.

Bella

Thanks Bella!

The photographer took the pictures with his iPhone, holding it to take a portrait/vertical shot, rather than landscape/horizontal. Neither he nor I used any image processing software, beyond rotating them in WordPress when they became horizontal/landscape after uploading, and the photo always looked correct on the iPhone, computer, and the website when viewed on a computer.

I cleared the cache on my browser, and unfortunately they still appear incorrectly. Would taking the original files the photographer sent me, rotating them 360-degrees in Photoshop, saving, and re-uploading fix the problem?

Thanks again!

So the answer to that last question of mine is that yes, that did fix the problem. Thanks again!