IPhoto slide shows and rotation

Question

Slide shows I have created in iPhoto 6.0.6 and synced to Apple TV have occasional images rotated 90 degrees from normal. They show fine within iPhoto previews, but give a different result on Apple TV. Any idea how I can resolve this?

Answer 1

I've managed to solve this problem without resorting to Apple's suggested manual revert on each photo. Here's what I've done.
Disclaimer: 1) This involves some light work in the Terminal. If you're not comfortable with that, you'd probably be better off following Apple's suggestion. 2) It's always wise to have a backup of your photo library, just in case you make a mistake and want an easy way to revert to where you started. 3) I'm using iPhoto 6, not iPhoto 7 (which is the later version). The instructions shouldn't change much, but in iPhoto 7 you'll have to deal with the library being wrapped as a package. And there may be other minor differences I'm not aware of.
1) Verify that you're dealing with the same problem I am. The major symptoms are that the image(s) appears correctly in iPhoto, but is rotated incorrectly in Apple TV. Also, the image should have been modified (probably rotated...) under iPhoto 4 or earlier, which means it was probably taken in 2004 or earlier, and if you click on the "Photos" menu while it's selected, "Revert to Original" will not be greyed out. Finally, if you open the photo in Preview (Right click on the photo -> Show File, then double-click to open), it should appear incorrectly rotated, as in Apple TV. If any of these things are not true, you should probably stop now, because we're not dealing with the same problem.
2) Identify all the messed-up files, and put them in a new iPhoto album. This is the most tedious step. I just set my Apple TV to 2-second delay, played the Library slideshow, and followed along on my computer, dragging each messed-up photo into the new album I had created.
3) Download ExifTool, a command-line utility that will let you modify jpeg metadata. <http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/> I didn't bother with the "Mac OS X Package" dowload -- just used the generic download link at the top of the page.
4) Open Terminal, and cd to the ExifTool directory.
5) Just to make sure things are working as expected, display the Orientation tag for one of your files. Type "./exiftool -Orientation " -- include the space at the end, and don't hit Return. Drag one of the messed-up photos into the Terminal window. The name of the file will appear on the command line. Now hit Return. You should get this output:
Orientation : Horizontal (normal)
6) Type "./exiftool -Orientation=Horizontal ". Again, include the extra space and don't hit Return. Drag the photos you want to fix into the Terminal window (might be wise to try just a few first, to make sure it works...) Before hitting Return, make sure each listed file appears in "iPhoto Library/Modified", not "iPhoto Library/Originals" -- you don't want to be messing with any originals. Hit Return. You should see this for each file:
Warning: Duplicate Orientation tag in IFD0 - /Users/Shared/iPhoto Library/Modified/2004/Roll 31/IMG_0861.JPG
7) The photos should now display correctly. Check to make sure.
8) If you'd like to, clean up the backups that exiftool has created by executing this command (entered exactly, but -- obviously -- changing the path to point to your photo library):
find "/Users/Shared/iPhoto Library" -name "*JPG_original" -exec rm \{\} \;
(Careful with this command -- it will permanently delete files. If you want to make sure you're deleting the correct files without actually doing so, leave off the "-exec" and subsequent stuff. Doing so will just list the filenames, not delete them.)