Why are my pics being automatically rotated from landscape to potrait??

Question

Background: I use a Nikon D90. I have used a Windows machine up until this week, and never had this issue. I spoke with customer service for over an hour trying to resolve this issue, fail. I take pictures of guitars. Every single picture is a landscape picture. I have set Image Capture as my default program to import pictures. When I connect the camera, the program turns all the pictures of guitar necks to portraits. iPhoto did the same, I use Image Capture because I can set a destination for my import. This is the issue. _I want to import my pictures exactly how I take them, all in landscape._
The windows machine never did this. I'm positive it isn't an issue with the camera. Out of all the pictures, it only does this with the guitar necks. I think the Mac is trying to "help" me by rotating my pictures for me. But they aren't pics of trees and they don't need rotated.
What do you guys think?
Can I attach a screenshot? I don't see an option...

Answer 1

I've used windows machine in the past, with the same camera and a few different import programs, and have never had this issue before.
Do those machines/programs support the auto-rotation feature of your camera? That is, if you take a picture in portrait orientation, do they show it rotated?
I'm not sure why the images of the neck are rotated... if, as you say, you took this photo in landscape orientation, with the bottom of the camera toward the ground, then there's no reason for them to be rotated unless your camera has a feature to auto-rotate based on the image content. I'm not finding any documentation of such a feature in a Nikon D90, though I didn't look very thoroughly.
One question: I can't tell from the photos, but it looks like the ones showing the issue could have been taken from above. If that's the case, this could be your problem. If you were shooting from above and took a picture of the body, then moved the camera, then took a picture of the neck, that could cause what I'm seeing. Keep in mind that your camera's accelerometer has no way of knowing that acceleration from movement is different from acceleration of gravity. Sliding your camera to the right on a rig might fool the camera into thinking it was rotated 90° counterclockwise, as shown in the photos of the front of the guitar, and sliding the camera to the left on a rig could make it think it was rotated 90° clockwise, as shown in the photos of the back of the guitar. With the camera pointing straight down, gravity would not re-orient the accelerometer as soon as the movement stopped.
That's just a theory, I have no way of knowing whether the camera would actually behave as I describe.
Is this question in the right forum?
Probably... if you were using iPhoto, it would be better in the iPhoto forum, but you're using Image Capture, which makes it a little less clear-cut.