The remedy for what #300 could only stop. Fixing the EXIF strip means new uploads arrive the way the sender saw them; it cannot repair what is already stored, because that metadata is gone and the originals kept for #281's cut-outs were re-encoded on the way in too. Every portrait photo since #226 needs a person to look at it and turn it.
Rotation rewrites the file rather than recording an angle. Storing an angle keeps the bytes pristine and makes undo exact, but it puts an obligation on every consumer — the storefront, both admin screens, the drafting worker's photo reader, and the rembg sidecar — and any one that forgets shows the photo sideways. The sidecar in particular is not ours to teach. Rewriting means nothing else in the system has to know rotation exists, and the cost is bounded: one rotation is a second generation at quality 82, which is why the control offers both directions rather than making somebody press one button three times to undo.
Per photo, and that is deliberately the opposite of what #293 decided for background removal. The reason there does not carry: three photos of a vase can each be wrong in a different direction, so turning them together would fix one and break two.
A cut-out and its original turn together. An image that has been through #281 has two files, and rotating only the displayed one would leave them disagreeing — Restore original would then silently un-rotate the photo, turning the undo of one feature into a regression of another.
The endpoints go on the item rather than the draft, so the inventory editor needs no backend work at all when it follows: an image belongs to an item whether or not a draft row exists, and the second screen is then the same call from a different place.
Two things pinned so they are not settled by a coin-flip while implementing. Left is anticlockwise and right is clockwise, which is sharp.rotate(-90) and sharp.rotate(90) — sharp reads a positive angle as clockwise, so the sign is the whole mapping and reversing it produces a control that works and does the opposite of its label. And the displayed image has to be forced to reload: rotation does not change image_path, so the img src is identical afterwards and the browser keeps what it has. express.static is mounted with no maxAge and would serve the new bytes on a page reload, but nothing in a session asks it to, so the src gets a cache-busting parameter after a successful turn.
One honest asymmetry recorded rather than engineered around: rotation is not idempotent the way background removal is, so a retry after a half-done failure turns the displayed file twice. That needs the disk to break between two writes, and the remedy is one press in the other direction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
bermudalambandClaude Opus 5
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