Pictures the right way up

September 9, 2026

The camera has its own button on the phone, a photo taken holding the phone upright is stored upright, and a picture that is on its side can be turned straight from the gallery.

Open a line to read the whole story behind it.

• Improved Every picture on a product or a location now has a turn button on it, so you can straighten one without opening it first.

  Turning a picture meant opening it on a screen of its own, turning it, saving, and coming back — four steps for the one thing most often wrong with a photo. Point at any picture on a product or a location (or just tap it, on a touch screen) and there is now a turn button between Edit and Delete. Each press turns it a quarter clockwise and saves straight away, so three presses reach any direction and three more put it back. It costs a tiny amount of picture quality each press, because the file is rewritten every time — if you want to line one up exactly, the Edit button above it still opens the bigger screen, where you can turn it as many times as you like and save once at the end.

• Fixed On the phone, Take a photo and Choose from your library are now two buttons instead of one that left the choice to your phone.

  Adding a photo to a product on the phone used to show one button and leave it to the phone to ask whether you wanted the camera or a picture you had already taken. Newer Android phones stopped asking: the button went straight to your stored pictures, so the camera was out of reach and the only way to photograph the thing standing in front of you was to leave the app, take the picture, come back and find it in your library. There are now two buttons — Take a photo, which opens the camera, and Choose from your library, which opens your stored pictures — on the Photos screen and on the form for cataloguing something new. The camera takes one picture per press, which the button says underneath it, so a part and the plate on it is two presses. The library button still takes several at once, up to ten. iPhones asked properly before and are unchanged.

• Fixed A photo taken holding the phone upright is now stored upright, instead of arriving on its side.

  A phone does not turn its camera when you turn the phone. It always records the picture the same way round and writes a note beside it saying which way up you were holding it, and your photo app reads that note — which is why the photo looks right on your phone. This app did not read it. It made its own smaller copy of your picture to keep, and that copy came out the way the camera recorded it, with the note thrown away: on its side, for good. The note is read now, and the picture is turned before it is stored, so what you see afterwards is what you took. Photos already on their side are unchanged, and you can still put those right with the turn buttons.