Images taken with ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE always returns 1 for ExifInterface.TAG_ORIENTATION on some Gingerbread devices

Ok guys, it seems like this bug for android won’t be fixed for a while. Although I found a way to implement the ExifInformation so that both devices (ones with proper Exif tag, and also improper exif tags work together)..

So the issue is on some (newer) devices, there’s a bug that makes the picture taken saved in your app folder without proper exif tags while a properly rotated image is saved in the android default folder (even though it shouldn’t be)..

Now what I do is, i record the time when I’m starting the camera app from my app. THen on activity result, I query the Media Provider to see if any pictures were saved after this timestamp I saved. That means that, most likely OS saved the properly rotated picture in the default folder and of course put a entry in the media store and we can use the rotation information from this row. Now to make sure we are looking at the right image, i compare the size of this file to the one I have access to (saved in my own app folder);

    int rotation =-1;
    long fileSize = new File(filePath).length();

    Cursor mediaCursor = content.query(MediaStore.Images.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI, new String[] {MediaStore.Images.ImageColumns.ORIENTATION, MediaStore.MediaColumns.SIZE }, MediaStore.MediaColumns.DATE_ADDED + ">=?", new String[]{String.valueOf(captureTime/1000 - 1)}, MediaStore.MediaColumns.DATE_ADDED + " desc");

    if (mediaCursor != null && captureTime != 0 && mediaCursor.getCount() !=0 ) {
        while(mediaCursor.moveToNext()){
            long size = mediaCursor.getLong(1);
            //Extra check to make sure that we are getting the orientation from the proper file
            if(size == fileSize){
                rotation = mediaCursor.getInt(0);
                break;
            }
        }
    }

Now if the rotation at this point is still -1, then that means this is one of the phones with proper rotation information. At this point, we can use the regular exif orientation on the file that’s returned to our onActivityResult

    else if(rotation == -1){
        rotation = getExifOrientationAttribute(filePath);
    }

You can easily find out how to find exif orientations like the answer in this question Camera orientation issue in Android

Also note that ExifInterface is only supported after Api level 5.. So if you want to support phones before 2.0, then you can use this handy library I found for java courtesy of Drew Noakes; http://www.drewnoakes.com/code/exif/

Good luck with your image rotating!

EDIT: Because it was asked, the intent I’ve used and how i started was like this

Intent intent = new Intent(MediaStore.ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE);
//mediaFile is where the image will be saved
intent.putExtra(MediaStore.EXTRA_OUTPUT, Uri.fromFile(mediaFile));
startActivityForResult(intent, 1);