Photos come out sideways in a PDF: why, and the fix

Fix the PDF now

1. Drop the PDF with the sideways pages. Several PDFs at once work too; each is turned on its own.
2. Turn: 90° right turns clockwise, 90° left anticlockwise, 180° turns an upside-down page.
3. Pages: All, Odd, Even, or Some with the page numbers typed, such as 3 or 2, 5-7.
4. Rotate and download.

If different pages need different turns, use Organise PDF instead: every page has a Turn button that adds a quarter turn clockwise per click, so 1 click is right, 2 is upside down, 3 is left. Press Apply when they all stand up.

Why it happens: the orientation note

A phone camera’s sensor has 1 fixed way up. When you hold the phone upright, the camera still records the picture as if the phone were on its side, and then writes a small note into the JPEG’s EXIF data: the Orientation tag, a number from 1 to 8. 1 means “as stored”, 6 means “turn a quarter clockwise”, 8 “a quarter anticlockwise”, 3 “upside down”; 2, 4, 5 and 7 add a mirror.

Gallery apps, file browsers and web browsers read the note and show the photo upright, so you never see the stored version. A PDF is different. PDF’s picture format for photos is JPEG itself, so a converter can copy a JPEG’s bytes straight into the file, but PDF viewers draw that picture data as it is stored and do not read EXIF. A converter that copies the photo without reading the note produces exactly the sideways page you are looking at.

What getPDF does with the note

JPG to PDF reads the Orientation tag before anything else:

• A quarter or half turn (3, 6, 8): the JPEG’s picture data is still copied in unchanged, and the page draws it turned, so the photo stands upright in every viewer and the page takes the upright shape. We tested a 1600 by 900 pixel photo tagged 6: the page came out portrait, 900 by 1600 points, and the result card said “1 JPEG embedded as it is, no re-encoding”.
• A mirror (2, 4, 5, 7): rare in practice. PDF cannot mirror a copied JPEG in this simple way, so your browser decodes and stores that photo once, and the result card names it: “was re-encoded because its orientation asks for a mirror”.
• HEIC from an iPhone: decoded on your device with its rotation applied, then written as JPEG at quality 90.
• PNG: a PNG can carry the same note (in an eXIf chunk), for example a photo an app saved as PNG. It is read and the picture stood up, mirrors included, and the PNG is still stored losslessly.
• TIFF scans: the TIFF’s own orientation tag is applied.
• WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP: decoded by your browser, which applies the orientation as it does on any web page.

With Orientation on Auto, the page follows the upright photo: portrait photos on portrait pages, landscape on landscape.

The stubborn case: right in 1 app, wrong in another

Sometimes a photo is upright in Windows Photos and sideways somewhere else, or the other way round. The note and the pixels disagree:

• The note was stripped. An app that turned the pixels upright and dropped the tag is fine. One that dropped the tag without turning the pixels leaves the photo sideways everywhere, including in a good converter, because there is no note left to read.
• The turn was doubled. An app turned the pixels upright but kept the old note. Apps that obey the note now turn it again, and the photo lies sideways or upside down in them, while apps that ignore the note show it correctly.

In both cases no converter can know what you meant. Convert as usual, then turn the odd page in Rotate PDF or with Turn in Organise PDF. It takes a few seconds per page and fixes it for every viewer.

The honest part: fix the PDF, not the photo

• Rotating a PDF page is lossless. Rotate PDF sets the page’s rotation entry, which every viewer honours; nothing is re-rendered and text stays text. Our 1-photo test PDF went from 349,829 to 349,821 bytes.
• Rotating the JPG can cost quality. Some photo programs turn a JPG by decoding and saving it again, which compresses it a second time. If you want the photos themselves turned, use a program that says it rotates losslessly, or leave the photos alone and turn the PDF.
• Rotate turns pages, not pictures on a page. If a photo sits sideways on a page among text, as in a scanned form, turning the page turns the text too. That is an editing job for the editor.
• It cannot straighten a tilted photo. Quarter turns only. A document photographed at an angle needs a scanner app’s straightening before it becomes a PDF.

Combine photos into one PDF covers the rest of a photo PDF: order, page size and file size.