I´ve been having a problem when moving images from my iPhone and iPad to my PC. Some images that require to be rotated were not rotating when trying to use the embedded “Rotate Clockwise” or “Rotate Counter-clockwise” within Windows Explorer (right clicking on the image). I received an error “You cannot rotate this image. The file might be in use or open in another program, or the file or folder might be read-only” or also “Windows Photo Viewer can’t save the changes to this picture because there’s a problem with the picture’s file properties”
To avoid this I had to open the image on Paint or a more powerful editor to be able to rotate it and then save it again.
As you can imagine this is quite a big hassle, so after some research online, I found a tool called: “JPEG & PNG Stripper” this portable, free tool will allow you to strip the metadata that the iPhone and iPad add to the images that prevent Windows Explorer to rotate the images by right clicking on them. One good thing about this tool is that it doesnt affects at all the quality of the image itself, it just strips the metadata you dont want.
How the tool works is very simple, once you open it, you just drag and drop the iPhone/iPad images into the white space in the program windows and you are set. The default options work for me, for example I like to preserve the original date of the taken picture. Of course you can modify the options as you please 🙂
You can download the tool from the developers website here.