Rotate images - inefficiently!
I took about 200 pictures yesterday (Sunday) with my Nikon Coolpix P6000 camera during my trip to Thonburi. I took more with my Canon EOS-30D. I took about 15% of the images in portrait orientation.
I took the subway from Hua Lamphong Station to home at Thailand Cultural Centre. It’s about a 20 minute journey. I spent the whole trip rotating my images correctly.
I know I have mentioned this before, but the software Nikon provide on the camera to do this is very annoying.
- You can use the wheel control on the top right of the camera or the four-way multi controller on the back to select an image. But you can only move serially through the images. The up/down arrows on the multi controller don’t do anything. I want them to move forward or backward a whole row of images. I think the reason Nikon don’t allow this is ‘user interface consistency’ with another tool on the camera. This is the one that allows you to mark a photo read-only. In this module you use up/down to mark/unmark an image. There is no such command in the Rotate tool – you can only rotate one image at a time. So the user interface designers must have thought it better to disable up/down.
- Every time I use the tool it positions the screen at the last image I took. So I have to move serially backwards or forwards increasing number of clicks to locate the next image that needs rotating. It could easily remember where I was last and start from there – reducing a lot of scrolling. But no – it wants to make the user work.
Of course it would be far quicker to rotate the photos in Lightroom. But if Nikon provide a tool then I think they should make it as good as possible. Again, this is their top-of-the-line compact.
Best of all is to make it unnecessary by implementing an orientation sensor in the hardware. But I’ve complained about that before.
So I got tired fingers rotating everything. I expect the other passengers on the train thought it was playing a video game. No, it wasn’t that much fun.
Enough carping about the faults of the camera. I was very pleased with the images I obtained on a sunny, not too humid day. I enjoy using the camera and I enjoy being able to see more-or-less exactly where each image was taken using its GPS unit.
