Two possible reasons.  First, that the photograph is upside down or sideways on Flickr, too.  Sometimes, people just hang the painting the wrong way…

The second, and more likely, is that the person uploaded the photo sideways, and corrected the photo on Flickr to be the right way up.  Depending on what size you download - and we prefer the large ones - we might get the original, and have no idea if the user rotated it once on Flickr.

I don’t know if there’s a way to find out what rotation was applied by the user via Flickr’s API.  If you do, contact me.

Last updated on January 10, 2010 by Gregory Block