I sometimes rotate my phone to take photos. This causes the photo's EXIF metadata to have a rotation value other than 1. My phone is able to automatically orient these photos when they're displayed.

Unfortunately, my screen saver is not. Consequently a few of my ~44,000 photos render incorrectly. Fortunately the Python ImageOps library makes it easy to find such photos and fix them.

Here's the script I wrote to automatically check all my photos, and fix the ones that need it. Enjoy!

You'll need to change this line to point to the folder on your machine that holds your digital photos:

folder_path = Path('Z:/Photos/Photo Album')

Oh, just one more thing: ImageOps.exif_transpose is lossless.

import os
from pathlib import Path
from PIL import Image, ImageOps
from PIL.ExifTags import TAGS

ORIENTATION_TAG_ID = next(k for k, v in TAGS.items() if v == 'Orientation')

def main():
    folder_path = Path('Z:/Photos/Photo Album')

    for file_path in [f for f in folder_path.rglob("*") if f.is_file()]:
        path = os.path.abspath(file_path)

        if path.lower().endswith('.jpg') or path.lower().endswith('.jpeg'):
            img = Image.open(path)

            exif = img.getexif()

            if exif is not None:
                orientation = exif.get(ORIENTATION_TAG_ID)

                # If photo needs to be rotated
                if orientation is not None and orientation != 0 and orientation != 1:
                    print(f'fixing orientation: {orientation} "{path}"')

                    corrected_image = ImageOps.exif_transpose(img)
                    corrected_image.save(path)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()