RELATED: What Is EXIF Data, and How Can I Remove It From My Photos? If you take an image in portrait mode, the camera knows and can act accordingly so you don’t have to rotate it yourself. The sensor detects which way you’re holding the camera, in an effort to rotate the photos properly. Manufacturers wanted to solve this annoyance, so they added rotation sensors to modern digital cameras and smartphones. The rotated image would appear the same in every program…as long as you took the time to manually rotate them all.
The image editor would move the pixels to rotate the image, modifying the actual image data. You could then use an image editor program to rotate the image to appear in its correct portrait orientation. So, even if you used a camera and held it vertically to take a photo in portrait mode, that photo would be saved sideways, in landscape mode. Digital cameras didn’t bother rotating images automatically. Traditionally, computers have always rotated images by moving the actual pixels in the image.
