Bitmap is rotated after taking photo with Camera

Question

After taking a photo while the device is in portrait using the Camera API and a preview SurfaceView, the image that is created is rotated 90 degrees. I understand this is an issue affecting some android phones including the Samsung Galaxy S5 I'm developing on - there are several stack overflow questions about that - see here and here. It was suggested the image file will contain EXIF metadata that will state the orientation it was rotated by so you can use that to rotate the image back to obtain the correct orientation. I've done just that, but for some reason the ExifInterface.TAG_ORIENTATION is 1 - ORIENTATION_NORMAL. Therefore I cannot determine how much the image needs to be rotated to ensure it will work on all devices. Even though that solution seems to have worked for others. What have I done wrong, or how else could this issue be resolved?

Some pseudocode:

//in onCreate
camera = getCameraInstance();
setCameraDisplayOrientation(this, cameraID, camera);

//in OnClickListener
camera.takePicture(null, null, picCallback);

//callback:
onPictureTaken {
    //create a File using getExternalStoragePublicDirectory(PICTURES) + "appname" - create directory if doesn't exist
    //write file to disk via FileOutputStream

    //attempt to correct the image orientation if needed
    Bitmap correctBitmap = getCorrectOrientationBitmap(picFile.getAbsolutePath());
}

public Bitmap getCorrectOrientationBitmap(String photoFilePath) {
    // Read EXIF Data
    ExifInterface exif = null;
    try {
        exif = new ExifInterface(photoFilePath);
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        return null;
    }
    String orientation = exif.getAttribute(ExifInterface.TAG_ORIENTATION);
    //problem: orientation is 1 - ORIENTATION_NORMAL despite the fact the image is rotated to the right 90 degrees
    //rotate the image based on EXIF orientation
}

//later on
myImageView.setImageBitmap(correctBitmap); 
//shows image rotated to the right because getCorrectOrientationBitmap didn't rotate it

Answer 1

--EDIT-- in my code...

matrix.postRotate(rotation);

uses the value for "rotation" that felix's code returns from his cursor.

i think your photos got a URI.... look at the interface vs the use of a static attr value for type....

public static int getOrientation(Context context, Uri photoUri) {
    /* it's on the external media. */
    Cursor cursor = context.getContentResolver().query(photoUri,
            new String[] { MediaStore.Images.ImageColumns.ORIENTATION }, null, null, null);
    if(null == cursor){
        return -1;
    }
    if (cursor.getCount() != 1) {
        return -1;
    }

.....

if (getOrientation(mctx, mURI) != 0 && != -1) doRotate();


public doRotate(){
    Bitmap lbit =   
    BitmapFactory.decodeStream(                                               getContentResolver().openInputStream(_uri),null,options);
    Log.i(TAG, "Rotating... " + rotation);
    lbit = lbit.copy(Bitmap.Config.ARGB_8888, true);
    Matrix matrix = new Matrix();
    matrix.postRotate(rotation);
    lbit = Bitmap.createBitmap(lbit, 0, 0, lbit.getWidth(),
    lbit.getHeight(), matrix, true);
    Picture.setBmp(lbit);

    cursor.moveToFirst();
    return cursor.getInt(0);
    }
}

Answer 2

I was playing with this issue a while ago and posted some camera code on GitHub here. The issue was that you deal with 3 different entities:

• surface orientation - depends on the device orientation at the moment
• preview width / height you get from 'surfaceChanged'
• final picture orientation as you get from 'takePicture'

In the example mentioned, I rotate the final image the same amount as I rotated the preview at the beginning. I haven't tested it on S5, so if you go this way, please let me know if it works there.

One more thing, there is also an issue with some tablets (see readme.md), where some have 'natural' orientation landscape (Nex7 1Gen) where others (Nex7 2Gen) have it portrait- same as phones.

Good Luck

Answer 3

When you use picture callback instead of camera capture intent, EXIF orientation is not set. But on the other hand, you can know exactly the device orientation when the user clicked the "capture" button or its equivalent.

It becomes even easier if your activity is locked into Portrait orientation - you can unconditionally apply rotation by 90°.

Bitmap rotation may be pretty expensive in terms of both memory and performance, therefore if your use case is satisfied by setting the correct TAG_ORIENTATION, then simply apply this change to the image you save. Note that ExifInterface works with files, not byte[], therefore counterintuitively you should first save the buffer, then apply rotation, and save again.

Answer 4

Before taking picture it is required to setDisplayOrientation() according to the current device orientation. This is not done automatically and by default is always set to 0 degrees that usually corresponds to landscape orientation.

This is not Galaxy s5 issue