Phone cameras record which way up a photo was taken in an EXIF orientation tag rather than physically rotating the pixels, so a picture that looks upright on the phone can land sideways once it is uploaded to a Confluence page. Rotating it by hand in an external editor and re-uploading works, but it re-compresses the JPEG and throws away the original metadata. CelesteCS Image Lossless Rotator fixes this directly on the Confluence page instead.

The one-click fix

Open the page for editing, click the sideways image to bring up its property panel, and choose Rotate according to image orientation. The plugin reads the EXIF Orientation tag written by the camera and rotates the image to match – no need to know in advance whether it was 90, 180 or 270 degrees off.

Why it stays lossless

Ordinary JPEG rotation has to decode the image to pixels and re-encode it, which degrades quality a little every time. CelesteCS Image Lossless Rotator instead rotates the compressed 8x8-to-16x16-pixel blocks that make up a JPEG file directly, so the image data itself is never re-compressed. See Lossless Rotation for the technical explanation of why this works for JPEG but not for every format equally.

Keeping the metadata a photographer actually cares about

Rotating an image normally leaves its EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata behind, but CelesteCS Image Lossless Rotator copies that metadata across to the rotated file and updates the fields that depend on orientation, such as width and height. That means author credit, capture date and GPS location survive the rotation intact – see Copying image metadata for exactly which tags are preserved.

Because the whole operation runs as a REST call on the Confluence server itself, the original image file never has to round-trip to the browser and back, which also makes it practical to fix a whole page of misrotated photos in a couple of clicks rather than one download-edit-upload cycle per image.