Should I rotate my digital images?

Question

The dialog box keeps reminding me that rotating might permanently reduce its quality, but apart from reducing the size of the image, does rotating an image the right way round affect its quality in any other way?

And following WellTrav's answer, what software can give me real image-editing application?!

Using Nero. Rotating images taken in portrait style with the camera turned at 90 degrees but which are downloaded onto PC in landscape format.

Answer 1

It depends on what program you use to "rotate" them.
In most image editors, a multiple of 90-degrees rotation will not affect image quality in any way. All it does is move the origin of the image's coordinate system, nothing more.
However, in Microsoft's "Picture and Fax Viewer" application, it sometimes rotates AND scales images at the same time, which *will* affect image quality (if you then save the image over the un-rotated original).
Just do your rotation in a real image-editing application instead of Windows' default viewer, and your pictures will be unaffected except for orientation.

Answer 2

I have never had any problems rotating images. You will not reduce the size of the Image, just by changing it's orientation.

Answer 3

Rotating can reduce quality if the file is originally a JPEG and saved again as JPEG. JPEG is lossy compression, so you use quality each time you save the file. Irfanview has a lossless-jpg rotation option, and it's free.

Answer 4

photograph rotation does no longer reason photograph degredation, till you're additionally resizing it. It shouldn't remember what your photograph document format is. i've got not experienced any loss of high quality after rotating a picture.

Answer 5

Yea it does.. it seems stupid that it would but it does