Cannot Rotate Photos! Please Help

Anonymous

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!?!

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Anonymous

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:

Click on the Start menu.
Click on Computer.
Right-click the drive that is giving you trouble.
Select Properties.
Click on the Security tab.
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.

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

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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61 additional answers

Anonymous

2012-12-10T04:57:03+00:00

I agree. Ever since I have been on Windows 7, I can't rotate images. I have been on blog after blog and no one has been able to give good advice accept through Windows away. It use to be simple to rotate images, now it is impossible.

I can change the files from Read-Only, but when I go back they are reset to read-only. What the **** does this? How can you shut the process down? Why would Microsoft put something so stupid in their operating system.

I also followed the instructions to give Full Access to the entire C drive for everyone under the sun. I did it for the Administrator, my user account, guest user, etc... I did it for every user. Then I went and undid the Read-only for the 100th time. It is still read-only, and the system also took away the Full Access again. What is doing this????????????????

Give me back Windows XP. It was the last Operating System from Microsoft that was worth anything.

All this computer is worth is a paper weight, since it can't do a simple rotate of an image. Good thing I own Apple Mac Book Pro, I would be up the creek with images.

Anybody else got and idea of how to get this messed up system to rotate an image. Look I use to repair computers for other people. I am glad I am now a programmer, because if I had to deal with this on a daily bases. Give me back MS-DOS, at least it worked.
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Anonymous

2013-01-05T23:50:48+00:00

Same problem and no solution using any suggestions in this post. Only frustrated WIN7 users. I have searched and will keep searching but so far no luck. Consider the most simplistic task, rotating a JPG image and saving ... IS it really this difficult ? Cant be so... but will repost once I find a solution ... Maybe using a MAC is the answer... if so Microsoft lost its way somewhere between XP and Win7....
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Anonymous

2013-01-06T09:58:11+00:00

Same problem and no solution using any suggestions in this post. Only frustrated WIN7 users. I have searched and will keep searching but so far no luck. Consider the most simplistic task, rotating a JPG image and saving ... IS it really this difficult ? Cant be so... but will repost once I find a solution ... Maybe using a MAC is the answer... if so Microsoft lost its way somewhere between XP and Win7....

The only thing that has worked for me is to download google picasa and that rotates the photos fine! Why another program finds this task so simple yet Microsoft won't fix it is beyond me! As soon as I've got the funds I'm getting a MacBook!
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