Nothing makes me happier than finding a tool to save me time doing things I already do. Digital photography has changed the way I deal with photos. Online galleries allow all of my friends to share in on the experience without any printing, making copies, sending files, or any of the mundane old school methods of photography.

But, I have this part of my brain that gives me great pain when I think of data loss and gives me great satisfaction in knowing I’ve achieved the greatest possible quality or when I save all data. So while I completely enjoy the benefits of using lossy formats like MP3 and JPEG, I have a strong urge to be efficient about doing so.

So at some point I learned that jpegtran can do lossless image transformations with JPEG. But, using a command line tool to do hand rotations of pictures is much too tedious to be useful on a larger scale.

Hence, EXIF. Exif is the Exchangeable Image File Format. It’s a nifty little standard for adding useful information to JPEG files such as thumbnails, camera metering modes, camera orientation and all sorts of other information that might be useful.

Now, take the jpegtran algorithm, throw in some EXIF awareness in the mix and you get exifiron! Simply type ‘exifiron *.jpg’ in a directory full of jpegs and automagically all your original jpegs are rotated to the correct orientation.

Nifty eh?

Here is a nice link to jpegclub.org that has quite a few lossless jpeg applications, including some nice easy windows binaries for those command line deprived windows users.