Windows XP fun and joy!

[ssurgul]

And this time, it's nothing fecetious!

Hot DAMN.

I just right clicked on some of my ... well, many, many images. And in there is an option to rotate the image 90 degrees one way or other. And it did it, and saved it, and didn't modify the creation or modification dates for the pics at all. And when uploading them elsewhere, they retained the rotation. I realize this violates the integrity of the pics, but something so rudimentary is not something I'm going to miss tracking. Damn, it's sweet! Every now and then I find new and exciting reasons to like Windows again. It doesn't offset the realities of how much grief Billy has put us through, nor how horrible his code is, ultimately. But little things like this are soooooo cool.

Comments

[shadowolf.livejournal.com]

It's not entirely true that rotating a JPEG image will compromise its quality. There is a utility called jpegtran that can losslessly rotate a JPEG file whose length and width are multples of 8 (the size of a JPEG macroblock) - it does this by simply rearranging the position of the blocks and then the order of the DCT coefficients (or in English turns the macroblocks on their sides and then puts the JPEG puzzle back together correctly.)

If the size isn't a multiple of 8, then the edges get re-encoded, but for the most part, you'll never notice it. I don't know if XP uses jpegtran or not, but you could rotate the image and save it a few times, then compare the files in photoshop to see the exact differences.

[ssurgul.livejournal.com]

Oh, nono, the compromises and violation I was talking about were on the data integrity of dates being tracked (created/modified). After all, rotating the image does comprise a change to the data, no matter how tiny, even if it loses nothing at all in the transition. But modified dates are only really important if there's a series of pics that you want to keep mostly 'together' for date sorting. Not something I'm normally worried about. :)

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

http://www.irfanview.com/


One windows imaging program I've been using for years is Irfanview. It also has lossless translation and a bunch of other neat plug-ins.

While the program isn't nearly as complicated as some out there, the price is right and sometimes simple is all you need.