img tag displays wrong orientation

I found part of the solution. Images now have metadata that specify the orientation of the photo. There is a new CSS spec for image-orientation.

Just add this to your CSS:

img {
    image-orientation: from-image;
}

According to the spec as of Jan 25 2016, Firefox and iOS Safari (behind a prefix) are the only browsers that support this. I'm seeing issues with Safari and Chrome still. However, mobile Safari seems to natively support orientation without the CSS tag.

I suppose we'll have to wait and see if browsers wills start supporting image-orientation.

Your image is actually upside down. But it has a meta attribute "Orientation" which tells the viewer it should be the rotated 180 degrees. Some devices/viewers don't obey this rule.

Open it in Chrome: right way up Open it in FF: right way up Open it in IE: upside down

Open it in Paint: Upside down Open it in Photoshop: Right way up. etc.

If you have access to Linux, then open a terminal, cd to the directory containing your images and then run

mogrify -auto-orient *

This should permanently fix the orientation issues on all the images.

I forgot to add my own answer here. I was using Ruby on Rails so it might not be applicable to your projects in PHP or other frameworks. In my case, I was using Carrierwave gem for uploading the images. My solution was to add the following code to the uploader class to fix the EXIF problem before saving the file.

process :fix_exif_rotation
def fix_exif_rotation
  manipulate! do |img|
    img.auto_orient!
    img = yield(img) if block_given?
    img
  end
end

save as png solved the problem for me.