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BUG / REQUEST: Image rotate converts to huge png file...and eats data allowance


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Native image rotation is a great idea! However, not only am I finding this slow (c.20 seconds), I'm also finding that images are converted into a huge png file - say 3-5MB, even if they start off as a small jpg.

What's more, that quantity of data is then deducted from my monthly usage allowance!

Any way of rotating images without this happening?

Evernote 4.5.6.6884 on Windows 7 64bit

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Instant work-around: use a desktop-based free external app to rotate the image. Although Evernote now has the facility to rotate, I still use XnView because I invariably crop, rotate, resize and generally titivate images whilst they're open in the app. And they always wind up smaller than the original file. P'raps someone from Evernote can comment on whether the built-in feature injects bloat - clearly it shouldn't. I'd suspect though that the Windows Clipboard has something to do with it - I've had a hate-hate relationship with Clippy for some time..

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Native image rotation is a great idea! However, not only am I finding this slow (c.20 seconds), I'm also finding that images are converted into a huge png file - say 3-5MB, even if they start off as a small jpg.

What's more, that quantity of data is then deducted from my monthly usage allowance!

Any way of rotating images without this happening?

Evernote 4.5.6.6884 on Windows 7 64bit

Hi. Welcome to the forums!

I have moved your original post to the general discussion area, because at least part of the problem affects Mac as well. When I rotate an image using Evernote, it does not turn into a PNG. However, it does re-upload the image. Of course, as pictures are often several megabytes a piece, this will quickly eat into your allowance. I am almost done for the month, five days into my cycle. Ouch...

Gazumped mentioned rotating the photos first, but you cannot do that with photos sent from your mobile device. These are almost always displayed incorrectly. This is because Evernote does not recognize the codes telling it to rotate the photo a certain way (seems to affect iOS devices). This is a design decision by Evernote (not a bug, according to their staff), and the workaround (according to customer support) is to open it up on your desktop in order to rotate it. Now, I guess they would suggest rotating it within Evernote.

[EDITED] Any workarounds? Yes, for photos you do not send from your mobile device. Turn off sync, drag your images into Evernote on the desktop, and then rotate them all there before uploading, so you can avoid the double upload (I know nothing about this PNG issue, since I haven't seen it on the Mac).

Is it optimal? No. Not at all. I doubt many users will figure this out on their own, and probably not before they gobble through their upload limit at least one time. I think Evernote should change its policy. However, I don't work there, and I can only make this suggestion as a longtime image rotation gadfly.

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Gazumped mentioned rotating the photos first

Sorry if I wasn't clear - I take pics on my phone and wait for the notes to upload. Then go back over the notes on the desktop client and check that they show up in correct orientation. If not, I double click the picture, open it in XnView (which is my default image app in Windows), do my bit of image polishing and re-save the file. I do the same for any note with pictures whatever the source.

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Gazumped mentioned rotating the photos first

Sorry if I wasn't clear - I take pics on my phone and wait for the notes to upload. Then go back over the notes on the desktop client and check that they show up in correct orientation. If not, I double click the picture, open it in XnView (which is my default image app in Windows), do my bit of image polishing and re-save the file. I do the same for any note with pictures whatever the source.

But, won't this result in a double upload?

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Yup - I guess the pictures I take are usually fairly small so the extra 100K or so doesn't matter a lot in the grand scheme of things. And I'm prepared to take the hit so my notes can look pretty!

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Thanks both!

I have previously done what you have done, gazumped, i.e. opened the photo from the desktop (in Windows Live Photo Gallery), rotated and saved. That was not too bad, even with the double upload.

I've just tried doing another jpg using Evernote's rotate - it went from a 900K jpg to an 8MB png. That's crazy! Back to the old way for now...

My main need on this is scanning in text documents from my phone's camera. So a great solution for me would be if Evernote could either:

  1. take on board the orientation data from the phone; or, even better
  2. automatically rotate based on detecting the predominant text direction. Surely that wouldn't be too hard as it's putting it through OCR anyway! And that would cover the times when the phone gets it wrong.

I'm a total Evernote fan, and having this sorted would just make it one little bit slicker...

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titivate

Word of the day. I'd really love to drop it on one of my Words-with-Friends nemeses... :)

On the rotation issue: I took a JPEG and dropped it into a note.

Exported that note to ENEX format. This file is about 19K in size.

Rotated the image, and exported that to ENEX format. That file is about 91K.

Inside the first ENEX file, the image is tagged as JPEG. Inside the second ENEX file, the image is tagged as PNG.

At a guess, the image rotation tool is bringing images into one common format (.PNG) and rotating that (you need to use an uncompressed format to do the rotation), but not converting it back to the original format when it's stored back to the note.

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titivate

Word of the day. I'd really love to drop it on one of my Words-with-Friends nemeses... :)

On the rotation issue: I took a JPEG and dropped it into a note.

Exported that note to ENEX format. This file is about 19K in size.

Rotated the image, and exported that to ENEX format. That file is about 91K.

Inside the first ENEX file, the image is tagged as JPEG. Inside the second ENEX file, the image is tagged as PNG.

At a guess, the image rotation tool is bringing images into one common format (.PNG) and rotating that (you need to use an uncompressed format to do the rotation), but not converting it back to the original format when it's stored back to the note.

this seems to only be a windows problem (op originally posted there). so, it looks like mac and windows handle image rotation differently.

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this seems to only be a windows problem (op originally posted there). so, it looks like mac and windows handle image rotation differently.

Yes, well, that's a surprise? :) Different OS's / SDK's may have different tools available (think PDFs on Mac vs Windows), so that might be one reason for the difference, or it may just be an oversight in the Windows client -- this is a relatively new feature.

Regardless, the re-upload makes perfect sense; it *is* a different image after rotating. A good reason to do your image processing before you put images into Evernote, if that fits your workflow.

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this seems to only be a windows problem (op originally posted there). so, it looks like mac and windows handle image rotation differently.

Yes, well, that's a surprise? :) Different OS's / SDK's may have different tools available (think PDFs on Mac vs Windows), so that might be one reason for the difference, or it may just be an oversight in the Windows client -- this is a relatively new feature.

no surprise. just clarifying the issues, especially since i was the one who moved the thread, and for those who work in different environments, i want to give them a workaround for the png problem (actually two: process it first or use a mac).

Regardless, the re-upload makes perfect sense; it *is* a different image after rotating.

it makes sense, but there is no way for users to know this until they test it, so i'd say out of about 23 million users, you will have more than a few who are confused and frustrated. i think evernote ought to make an exception for users who utilize a feature within the app to edit data stored in evernote. otherwise, it makes the feature a lot less useful. i'll be fine whatever they decide, but i don't think the current system is very user friendly. an improvement on no editing, to be sure, but not quite there yet.

A good reason to do your image processing before you put images into Evernote, if that fits your workflow.

except, that you cannot. on the iphone and ipad, no matter what you do, the image gets misinterpreted by evernote. so, if you are like me and take photographs of a lot of receipts, then this breaks my workflow. i hear that taking photos with certain apps within ios might get the images to display correctly in evernote, but i am not terribly keen on buying more apps to replace the ones i already bought, just so that my images are straight in evernote. maybe other users will figure out which one works and fork out the money. i bet there are not too many of them, though. it is in everyone's best interest for evernote to have this feature (a good improvement) and to make sure that they don't penalize users for taking advantage of it.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 1 year later...

Yes, it's certainly still an issue for me on the PC desktop client. (I just tried, and a 360KB jpg became a 4.7MB jpg, with a corresponding 4.7MB gone from my monthly allowance.)

 

On the PC I therefore still do things the old-fashioned way - open the image in Windows Photo Gallery, rotate and close. That saves it back into Evernote and keeps the image the same size.

 

However, on Android things have moved on. The good news is that I can now rotate images (using Skitch) and save them without increasing the file size.

 

So it's a partial solution!

 

Incidentally, it would be great if the Camera feature on the Android app simply had an option to rotate an image before saving it into a note. When I'm capturing documents, about 50% of the time the camera guesses the wrong orientation, which is where most of my rotation needs arise!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Certainly still is a problem.  I have my Bother scanner setup to scan directly to Evernote which is really handy.

But I did a number of documents that were landscape and I thought I could fix the problem by picking "rotate" from

within Evernote.  Since it is possible to losslessly rotate a jpg I assumed they would do that without needed to rewrite the whole image.

Imaging my surprise when my 150k scans were changed to 1.2M pngs!  Worse when I made a mistake and rotating the wrong direction it would sync the upside down version before I rotated two more times to get the right orientation.

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  • 3 months later...

Versio 5.1.0.2217 (270217) Public

 

6 pictures rotated and increased notesize from 24MB to amazing 64MB - took me about 20 minutes on a i7L640@2.13GHz 4GB RAM W7-32 Ulimate.

 

It is not nice to work that way and uses too much valuable time of my life...!

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Yup I concur - kinda.  67KB JPG rotated 90 degrees becomes 520KB JPG which appears to be a bug.  Took me a couple of minutes on an i7 with 8GB RAM.  Short term fix - use a different editor to mess with your pictures and/ or don't upload pictures that need this kind of editing...

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Does anyone know if posting a serious issue such as this gets it into the EN Support bugs/feature request workflow for action?  I'm inclined to create a ticket and reference the forum discussion to be sure that it does (not that it is any guarantee to be addressed... but at least it is "official").

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  • 7 months later...
  • 6 months later...

March 2015 and it's still there...

 

I can see few problems:

1. When rotating JPEG, JPEG lose-less rotate should be applied. Definitely, when rotating JPEG it should remains JPEG, when PNG - then PNG, and so on

2. When I import images using Import Folder, sometimes image orientation is broken, i.e. portrait image is imported as landscape image, but when i double-clink on it and open in my default Windows image viewer (FastStone) it is displayed correctly (i.e. landscaped). I can sent some examples if needed.

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  • 1 year later...

Hi,

Not too uplifting to read through - and see this issue is ongoing still!

I run into this limit upload quite frequently - I have a need for creating notes that contains up to 10-15 images I find typically from the internet and copy/paste into the note to keep as inspiration. As I understand I'll have to work around this issue and instead of going directly into Evernote with the pics I'll need to use another program/app to edit and/or resize my picture BEFORE I then upload them to my note in Evernote.... It seems REALLY counterproductive! 

Also - how do I see the actual size of a particular note? 

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Well, the most recent post was March 1, 2015, so the original issue is not necessarily still ongoing. At any rate, I tried rotating a JPEG image in a note, and checking its size before and after, and there seemed to be no increase. It certainly didn't change to PNG.

As to checking sizes of images, I did a right-click and Save As, then checked the size of that. But I also found (duh) that I could open the image in my default image viewer by clicking the "eye" icon on it, and find the file size within that program.

AFAIK, you're right, images have to be edited and resized in another program before being put into Evernote. It would be great if we could resize images within Evernote; but I suspect that if they worked on that, they'd get a zillion complaints along the line of "Why are you wasting time on such a frill when I need...."

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When rotating images, they're converted to PNG format. If anything, in my experiments, the image files shrink in size after being rotated (especially when I start with a JPG). If someone can provide a specific example of an image that grows significantly in size when rotated, please do and we'll look into it.

Also, the terminology in this area is confusing, but you can reduce the dimensions of an image in Evernote. In other words, you can shrink the height/width of an image by clicking it and dragging the blue handle in the bottom right corner of the image. This will change the display size of the image, but it won't modify the contents or actual size of the image in your account. To accomplish that, you'll need to use a third-party application.

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Thanks for the clarification, emerick. I did find that when I rotated a JPEG image and saved it as a file, it saved as JPEG. Likewise when I opened it for viewing in my default image viewer, it opened a JPEG file. Are you saying that it becomes PNG in the attachments database or something?

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