Evince and EOG display TIFF files flipped

Confirmed on Ubuntu 8.04 32 bit.
Also affects Debian Lenny.

Since this also affects EOG (on both distros)
my best guess is this a libtiff problem.

This is not a libtiff bug, and the fact that the tiff file is multipage is not relevant. The problem is with the tiff file headers and with the applications' interpretations of those headers. I believe eog and evince are both misinterpreting the orientation header.

To rule out the multipage nature of the image as a source of the problem, you run tiffsplit on the attached image to get separate images for each of the eight pages, called xaaa.tif through xaah.tif. You can display any of those pages with evince or eog and see the same thing, indicating that this doesn't have anything to do with the image being a multipage image.

We can observe that the orientation of these tiff files is unusual. To do this, create a "normal" tiff file using "import" from ImageMagick. Run

import /tmp/a.tif

and click on any window. Then run

tiffinfo /tmp/a.tiff | grep Orientation

You will see

  Orientation: row 0 top, col 0 lhs

This means that the first row of the image is the visual top, and the first column is the visual left.

If you run tiffinfo on the attached image file and grep for Orientation, you see the following:

  Orientation: row 0 rhs, col 0 top
  Orientation: row 0 rhs, col 0 top
  Orientation: row 0 rhs, col 0 top
  Orientation: row 0 rhs, col 0 top
  Orientation: row 0 rhs, col 0 top
  Orientation: row 0 rhs, col 0 top
  Orientation: row 0 rhs, col 0 top
  Orientation: row 0 rhs, col 0 top

All subimages have row 0 rhs, col 0 top, meaning that the first row is the visual right and the first column is the visual top. This is the same as having the image rotated 90 degrees to the right.

It seems that both eog and evince are flipping the image horizontally instead of rotating it, and "display" from ImageMagick is ignoring the orientation field entirely. The only application I've been able to find that actually handles this orientation value is gthumb, which at least the way I have it configured (I know I set some option to obey image orientation because my Canon digital camera uses the jpeg orientation field), does actually show the image rotated 90 degrees to the right. Even gimp doesn't handle this properly. If you run gimp on one of the pages, you get the warning

** (tiff-load:27322): WARNING **: Orientation 6 not handled yet!

If you run tiffcp on the file to copy it to another file using the tiff library:

% tiffcp AK-LV104e.tif a.tif
AK-LV104e.tif: Warning, using top-left orientation.
AK-LV104e.tif: Warning, using top-left orientation.
AK-LV104e.tif: Warning, using top-left orientation.
AK-LV104e.tif: Warning, using top-left orientation.
AK-LV104e.tif: Warning, using top-left orientation.
AK-LV104e.tif: Warning, using top-left orientation.
AK-LV104e.tif: Warning, using top-left orientation.
AK-LV104e.tif: Warning, using top-left orientation.

you can observe that libtiff overrides the orientation. The resulting file displays properly with evince and eog and all the other viewers I can find.

I'm not sure whether eog and evince, both gnome applications, might be using the same underlying code between the application and libtiff to render the images. In that case, the bug is really against that library, not libtiff. It's al...

In case it gets buried in the above comment, here is a workaround for your problem:

 * The above includes a workaround: run tiffcp your-image.tif new-image.tif. The resulting image, at least in the case of the above attachment, displays properly in all the above mentioned applications.

Also, I should mention that, as the debian maintainer of the tiff packages, I very much appreciate that someone took the trouble to report the bug in the debian bug tracking system. This is how I became aware of the issue. I've closed the bug there with comments pending investigation of where the bug actually lives. At the time, I hope someone will again create the appropriate bugs in the debian bug tracking system and/or in the bug tracking systems for the upstream software.

Jay, many thanks for your research and analysis. Now, it seems the Ubuntu bug maintainer ("Monk-e" probably) should requalify the bug pertinence to Evince and EOG.

Added this bug to Evince. Don't know how to add more than one package (if that's at all possible). I hope the Evince or EOG maintainers can track the source of this bug.

Removing the link to Debian bugtracker to update the status manually.

here is the link to the invalid Debian bug:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=494453

I'm also getting it with Intrepid will look upstream thanks.

I've sent this upstream at: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548444 ; thanks everybody.

I've sent the eog issue to here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548474 ; The evince one was fixed upstream now, thanks all for reporting.

the new version is in intrepid now

Fixed in Eye of Gnome 3.1.2