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In which I continue to document my ongoing hatred of the EXIF Rotation flag for pictures posted from the iPhone, and hope that Tumblr.com will deal with it.

The other day I wrote about my attempts to get around iPhone’s use of the EXIF rotation flag which came down to this:

“Use Posterous to post pictures to Tumblr, and the rotation is taken care of.”

Fine, good, done, right?

Wrong.

Today I posted a picture for Michele today using Posterous-to-Tumblr and it worked fine…

…if you go to the page and look at it.

On the other hand, if you (like most people on Tumblr), only saw the post via the Tumblr Dashboard, you saw the image above, which is the international symbol of “There’s a picture in this post, but we aren’t going to show it to you” (but HEY! you can make yourself look like SHARK! or a CAT! And measure your Palinality!)

(Presumably Posterous so they can put a link back to their website under the image, which wouldn’t be possible if they posted it as an image.)

So I posted the original picture (via copy and paste) to Tumblr and Flickr.

Flickr corrected for the rotation.

Tumblr did not.

I looked for a way to post to Flickr-to-Tumblr via email, but for some reason Flickr doesn’t support Tumblr’s API for their “Blog This” despite Tumblr having an API for doing exactly that. (Hrm… maybe Flickr doesn’t want people using Tumblr for pictures? That seems dumb, I hope that’s not the reason.)

Look, the simple truth of the matter is this:

1. The iPhone is the most popular camera for people who use Flickr

2. Apple insists on using this EXIF rotation thing, and I expect to see a Michael Jackson concert live before I expect to see Apple change their minds about this.

3. People like posting pictures to Tumblr.

Therefore, Tumblr ought to take the frakkin’ EXIF rotation flag into consideration when it shows the pictures. Flickr is doing it. Tumblr can do it. I don’t care if it’s automatically converted/rotated on the server when it gets uploaded or what.

However, given how slowly things are evolving here, I’m not holding my breath.

I’ve resigned myself to the unhappy reality that I have to accept the trade-off of the iPhone downsizing emailed pictures if I want to be able to email them to Tumblr. Or maybe I’ll try the iPhone app again although as

Steve said earlier today:

Can I just say that the iPhone Tumblr app got just about everything wrong that it is possible to get wrong. That is all.

Part of this is due to the API which, for reading Tumblr, is, well, non-existent, but part of it is just how awkward using the app always felt for me. Before it got corrupted again and I had to delete it and re-download/install it.

So, to summarize, this problem is due to:

• Apple insisting on the EXIF Rotation flag
• Apple insisting on downsizing images when emailed

Pick one. Or both. And the problem could be solved if:

• Flickr would support posting to Tumblr though the existing Tumblr API
• Posterous would post to Tumblr as an “Image” vs “Text” post
• Tumblr would show embedded objects (images/video) in a “Text” post (which would be nice for a whole bunch of reasons, not just this particular use case.)
• Tumblr would “correct” for the EXIF Rotation flag.

From all of these possibilities, which do I expect to happen first?

Flickr.

Tumblr will consider it too much of an edge case or suggest that I use their iPhone app

Apple apparently thinks downsizing images is fine.

Posterous won’t want to give up its promotional text back-link.

There seems to be no good reason for Flickr not to support Tumblr’s API, so I hope it will be a matter of time. They can post as an image via the API and automatically setup the linkback without needing the text-link Posterous uses. And the image is still on Flickr, which is ultimately what they want (users to keep putting my pictures on Flickr, not elsewhere).