Cannot Rotate Photos! Please Help

Anonymous
2009-12-06T02:15:54+00:00

I cannot rotate my photos.   I have most of my photos on external hard drives.  When I attempt to rotate them (by either right clicking, opening them in paint, or opening them in Windows Photo Viewer) Windows 7 will not let me rotate them.  Instead I get an error message stating that "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."  I have tried giving my user account full access to the external drive, and I have also tried marking both the file, the folder, and the drive as readable.  It goes through and looks like it is doing something, but in the end, I always get the error message.  I can rotate them if they are on the C: drive, but my C: drive is too small to hold my photos collection..  Help!?!

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Music, photos, and video

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Anonymous
2010-01-08T23:58:11+00:00

I just installed Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, and I couldn't rotate any of the pictures on my internal hard drives. After clicking around, I figured out what the problem was.

You need to:

  1. Click on the Start menu.
  2. Click on Computer.
  3. Right-click the drive that is giving you trouble.
  4. Select Properties.
  5. Click on the Security tab.
  6. Click on the Edit button where it says "To change permissions, click Edit."

7. In the "Group or user names" box, click on the user that you want to edit. On my computer, I had to select "Users (computer-name\Users)" at the bottom of the list.

  1. In the "Permissions for Users" box, click on the check box to Allow Full control.
  2. Click ok.

It may popup boxes telling you that it can't change the permissions on certain files. Just click ok to move on.

Repeat these steps on each drive that is giving you trouble.

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Anonymous
2009-12-07T00:29:01+00:00

Hi mjwrigh,

Welcome to Microsoft Answers Forum. I would suggest you to run check disk to see if there are any error on the external hard drive, the following are the steps to run check disk. 1.           Click Start, and then Run. 2.            In Open, type cmd, and then press ENTER. 3.            Use one of the following procedures:            A. To run Chkdsk in read-only mode, at the command prompt, type chkdsk, and then press ENTER.                                B. To repair errors without scanning the volume for bad sectors, at the command prompt, type chkdsk volume:/f, and then press ENTER.           C.  To repair errors, locate bad sectors, and recover readable information, at the command prompt, type chkdsk volume:/r, and then press ENTER By default, if a picture is read-only, you can't edit the picture or change its file properties. If you do want to make changes to this picture, you need to change the picture's read-only setting. Additional Information: Rotate a picture

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/search?q=rotate+picture&prd=

Why can't I edit a picture?

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows-vista/Why-cant-I-edit-a-picture

Hope this helps. Let us know the results.

Thanks & Regards,

Vijay – Microsoft Support ****Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-09-01T09:16:48+00:00

    That is the perfect advice, the other info did not help, but this one surely works, thanks!

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-08-17T11:35:47+00:00

    i struggled for a day with this. Traced it to use of Kodaks Home Centre software that comes with my C315 printer/scanner. All the pictures I scanned with this software were stored with permissions that were not changeable by microsoft properties. Gave full access to myself and home users etc. as per other advice in this forum but to no avail. I tried cutting a nd pasting to another folder but these rogue permissions were still there. Tried copying and pasting all the photos or singly to another location with the same results. I was not allowed to modify the file with a pop up saying "the file might be in use or open in another program, or the file or folder might be read-only" Usual reboots etc. Finally a hint from another poster led me to right click "open with" Irfanview. On opening simply click "save" as the same file, it prompts for whether you want to save it as the same name. Do so. It overwrites the file and permissions with correct ones. God aone knows how Kodak or Microsoft conspired to allow this to happen but thank god for this forum. Kodak were absolutely useless on it. I have now changed the defaults in the Home Centre to use another program rather than Home Centre. That seems to have cured it to allow home centre to be used. Using home centre as it seems to allow scanning at 1200 dpi rather than the printer maintenance default max of 600 although no certainty that it is doing what it purports. **** hum. Meanwhile reset my MS account as they had lost my password again. On another note, curious how microsoft can see your password while you are setting it in order to tell you that you are using part of your email address. Surely the point of a password is that no one but you knows it. This is used for e.g. OneDrive. Shome shecurity eh?

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-03-19T02:40:05+00:00

    Fantastic!  Worked for me but has to be done for each individual photo. I can live with that. Thanks.

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