Today’s discovery: Tumblr rotates videos shot in portrait orientation 90° counterclockwise. That’s incredibly unhelpful, and an undesired modification of the original. It’s pretty obvious: if something has been shot in portrait, it’s only really going to work in portrait. Watching a video of my kitten leaping from right to left, rather than the expected from-the- ground-up-into-the-air, is disconcerting and it’s not what I want.

When a video is uploaded to Tumblr, one of two things needs to take place:

1. The video’s metadata is read by the server, and the video is then posted in the correct orientation, with up actually being up; or,
2. You give me a checkbox to tell the server that this is a portrait-oriented video.

It’s possible that there is some huge technical obstacle standing in the way of option № 1, which is far and away my preferred implentation. However, it seems unlikely — the videos play correctly, at the correct orientation, on every computer I’ve tried them on. “Up” is always “up”, and “down” is always “down”. So, using this unscientific method, one would surmise that the file contains sufficient metadata to ensure correction orientation is preserved during playback.

My guess, semi-educated, would be that it’s some kind of issue with the Flash player that Tumblr uses. It’s likely only set to support certain aspect ratios, and certain orientations, and portrait is, unfortunately, not on that list.

As issues go, this one isn’t world-breaking, nor is it enough to stop using Tumblr as current my platform of choice, but it does aggravate. It’s also going to prevent me from posting sometimes, which is definitely not what I expect from a site that claims to let me “effortlessly share anything”. And it’s an issue that’s going to come to the attention of ever-greater numbers of people as they shoot in portrait on their phone, only to find it gets rotated when they post it to Tumblr.