A few days ago I noticed that even though the image is displayed properly in my app thanks to my workaround code, when my algorithm modifies the individual pixels of the image, it thinks the image is rotated. My application modifies individual pixels of an image, specifically the alpha channel of a PNG (so any JPEG conversion gets thrown out of the window for my scenario). Now, my workaround was okay up until a few days ago.

My question this time is why is this happening? Why is Apple rotating images? When I take a photo with my camera right-side up, unless I perform my code mentioned above, when I save the photo it gets saved rotated. I wasn't sure why in the world this was happening (hence my question) but I was able to come up with a cheap work around. First, like many other people, I've been having this problem where images taken with the camera (or taken with somebody else's camera and MMS'd to me) are rotated 90 degrees. For the past few weeks I've been working with images in objective-c and noticing a lot of strange behavior.

Mac photo preview rotate