Stupid iPhone question: Why can’t it orient photos based on text?

Part of the software expert witness’s job is delving into computer science history. Sometimes the most efficient way to do this is to go to the library and browse among the books (sadly MIT seems to be archiving anything that doesn’t relate to C, Java, or Big Data; books on our home-grown MULTICS operating system are now banished, for example). My note-taking technique is to use my iPhone 7 Plus as a copier: open book, snap photo, turn page, snap photo, put book back on shelf. When I get home I find that a lot of these photos are upside-down. If there is nothing in the photo except for a book page and there is nothing on the book page except for Roman characters, why isn’t the software smart enough to orient the JPEG file correctly?

7 thoughts on “Stupid iPhone question: Why can’t it orient photos based on text?

  1. Use Evernote for this task: It straightens pages and turns them into black (or, where relevant, colour) text on full white. Those photos are dutifully saved to your Camera Roll.

  2. The usual answer for “why doesn’t my phone do simple task X” is often “someone holds a parent on that, and the license isn’t worthwhile”.

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