That NIX photo frame
More fiddling with the frame. Turns out it doesn't want to read standard EXIF rotational information so all the portrait shots aren't automatically rotated when the frame is positioned landscaped. Even worse if you then turn the frame to view such photos the built-in accelerometer detects the change and turns the frame into portrait mode and rotates the photos.
So a quick delve into the menu and I can see thumbnails of all the photo., I pick one that requires rotating and call up the options. There's a rotate but it's grayed out and non-selectable; that's useful. I play the slideshow and try to access the options again. Ah it needs to be paused before they'll appear, and yay rotate is now selectable. I 'down' to it and press play to select then play to rotate, then um how do I stop? The back button seems to work and the menu button too. Great.
So I page through the photos and rotate them. Then after a short time when I come to two in a row I go back instead of forwards and... it's not rotated. Yup unless I'm doing something wrong it's not saving the rotational information with the photo.
So I plugged it into my laptop and tried to rotate them there; damn that's slow. I ended up grabbing the portraits shunting them to my laptop, rotating them, them shunting them back. Now it's displaying them with no problem, but yeesh. Ah well at least I know now and can accommodate this 'quirk' in the future.
Oh and the battery lasts for about 3 hours with a 9 hour charge. So given how it's going to be used that's fine.
4 comments:
The EXIF rotatey thing is fine but, as it isn't supported by all viewers, I always run exiftran on all my new photos. It reads the EXIF tag and automatically rotates the DCT coefficients in the JPEG, so it doesn't need to decompress it, which saves a lot of time and avoids quality loss. It takes about half a second per 5MB image on my desktop.
Well I know both XP and Vista's built in preview system doesn't support it, but then again do they ever support anything slightly off the beaten track?
Trouble is I see this product being bought for non-techies (as I did) who'll just plug in an SD card from their camera and wonder why some photos are on their side.
Even if they do transfer from the computer I'm guessing exiftran is a Linux function that doesn't have a Windows equivalent.
Besides it's not as if this is some ageing product; that EXIF rotation is some strange beasty; or that this is some multi-function device. I'd expect a product dedicated to the display of digital photos to have had a little research done on it.
Hells teeth I'd expect it to have shown up the first time they tested it, unless none of the software designers knew about the extra info which would be worrying in itself.
Wait… It detects that you're trying to correct the problem and automatically uncorrects it for you?
EPIC FAIL.
Heh well the frame can be placed in either landscape or portrait positions. So as it assumes that all the pictures are the right way up, when you rotate the frame it thinks you're setting it up as portrait so it rotates the image to keep it to the right orientation. Of course as soon as you realise what's happened and turn it back to landscape the slight delay as it works out what's going on means the picture is now upside down.
Now I've adjusted the pictures it means he can turn the frame for the portrait shots and have them displayed full screen. As I say just silly that it doesn't do this automatically.
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