JS Client-Side Exif Orientation: Rotate and Mirror JPEG Images

Digital camera photos are often saved as JPEG with an EXIF "orientation" tag. To display correctly, images need to be rotated/mirrored depending on which orientation is set, but browsers ignore this information rendering the image. Even in large commercial web apps, support for EXIF orientation can be spotty 1. The same source also provides a nice summary of the 8 different orientations a JPEG can have:

Sample images are available at 4.

The question is how to rotate/mirror the image on the client side so that it displays correctly and can be further processed if necessary?

There are JS libraries available to parse EXIF data, including the orientation attribute 2. Flickr noted possible performance problem when parsing large images, requiring use of webworkers 3.

Console tools can correctly re-orient the images 5. A PHP script solving the problem is available at 6

Solution 1:

The github project JavaScript-Load-Image provides a complete solution to the EXIF orientation problem, correctly rotating/mirroring images for all 8 exif orientations. See the online demo of javascript exif orientation

The image is drawn onto an HTML5 canvas. Its correct rendering is implemented in js/load-image-orientation.js through canvas operations.

Hope this saves somebody else some time, and teaches the search engines about this open source gem :)

Solution 2:

Mederr's context transform works perfectly. If you need to extract orientation only use this function - you don't need any EXIF-reading libs. Below is a function for re-setting orientation in base64 image. Here's a fiddle for it. I've also prepared a fiddle with orientation extraction demo.

function resetOrientation(srcBase64, srcOrientation, callback) {
  var img = new Image();    

  img.onload = function() {
    var width = img.width,
        height = img.height,
        canvas = document.createElement('canvas'),
        ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");

    // set proper canvas dimensions before transform & export
    if (4 < srcOrientation && srcOrientation < 9) {
      canvas.width = height;
      canvas.height = width;
    } else {
      canvas.width = width;
      canvas.height = height;
    }

    // transform context before drawing image
    switch (srcOrientation) {
      case 2: ctx.transform(-1, 0, 0, 1, width, 0); break;
      case 3: ctx.transform(-1, 0, 0, -1, width, height); break;
      case 4: ctx.transform(1, 0, 0, -1, 0, height); break;
      case 5: ctx.transform(0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0); break;
      case 6: ctx.transform(0, 1, -1, 0, height, 0); break;
      case 7: ctx.transform(0, -1, -1, 0, height, width); break;
      case 8: ctx.transform(0, -1, 1, 0, 0, width); break;
      default: break;
    }

    // draw image
    ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0);

    // export base64
    callback(canvas.toDataURL());
  };

  img.src = srcBase64;
};