I think I've cracked it!

Its an Apple/all other platforms issue related to iPhone pictures being viewed on none apple devices/computers.

For anybody who is interested...

When iOS 5 was released, for the first time you could take a photo using the volume up button on the iPhone, the problem is that when you hold your camera with the volume buttons up, your photos will be upside down on most Windows machines.


If you rotate your iPhone, the camera sensor won’t know about it. It will simply record the image and save it to a file, letting the software of your phone do the rest. To make sure that your photos are displayed correctly, your iPhone adds information about the correct rotation of the photo to the properties of each image, which are specified in EXIF tags.


Your iPhone doesn’t convert any images to correct orientation because that would keep it busy for a few seconds. Instead it simply saves all photos as they were recorded and adds information about their correct orientation to EXIF tags. This means that your iPhone is ready to shoot another photo within a fraction of a second.


The problem is that some software developers, including Microsoft, ignore the information that’s stored in EXIF tags.


You can prevent any rotation issues in the future by taking your iPhone photos and videos with the volume buttons down.



If you already have a lot of photos that are shot upside down, it’s best to use software that knows how to deal with EXIF tags like picasa


*short hand version of the issue as copied/pasted from somewhere on line