Composite ORIENTATION always showing "Horizontal (normal)"

[ericmuzy]

I do not know if this is a bug or a lack of understanding from my side, but the Composite/Orientation tag always shows "Horizontal (normal)", whether my camera was horizontal or vertical when I shot.
I'm shooting JPEG with a recent Nikon DSLR.
Any idea why?
Thank you

[Mario]

This tag is generated by ExifTool, which produces it (my guess) from the EXIF orientation tag?
This tag is not listed in Phil's list so I cannot tell for sure.

When you use the Browser layout in the Metadata Panel, and search for Orientation to find the EXIF orientation tag, does it show the same value as Composte::Orientation?

[ericmuzy]

So, what I found is interesting and confusing...
Here it is:
When I use the Browser in the metadata panel, all my preexisting files show "Orientation: Horizontal (normal), whether they are landscape or portrait.
Interestingly, there is another tag called "Scene Capture Type" that shows either "Portrait" or "Standard", but again, it is not accurate in my case, and does not always match the "Orientation" tag..., so I can end up with "Orientation: Horizontal" and "Scene capture Type: Portrait" irrespective of the actual orientation of the picture.
Even more interesting: the Filter panel has an orientation filter option, and here it is RIGHT all the time!
So I assume the Filter panel does not rely on any of these 2 fields to properly determine the image orientation...so I would say that, because the Filter panel works fine, I'm OK overall...however whenever you have time, I would like to understand the logic used here!


Now, to be complete, these pre-existing images have been indexed at a point in time with IDImager, my current DAM (until V5 becomes public), so that may interfere here.
I'm making this comment, because if I index a fresh set of images solely into IM5, without ever going through IDImager first, then all is fine: all tags ("Orientation" and "Scene capture Type") are all accurate, and the filter panel again does work fine.

Thank you Mario for a such nice software, I can't wait to switch!

[Mario]

The EXIF orientation field is written by your camera. If your camera has an orientation sensor it knows whether you took the image in portrait or landscape mode and this will be written to the EXIF orientation field. But only if the camera writes the image in a way which requires software that displays the image to rotate the file before displaying it. This is not the case here. But that is not an error, it's actually normal. A EXIF orientation other than "Normal" is the exception.

The Scene Capture type is written by some cameras to record the program or scene preset chosen by the user. These are are values like Portrait, Standard, Sport, Night, Action, ... This is not associated with the actual orientation of the image.

The filter in IMatch does not look at the EXIF orientation tag. It looks at the final image dimensions to determine if a file is portrait or landscape.