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
    2013-02-12T16:06:02+00:00

    True, it's possible to rotate the images with other apps, but typically requires saving off a new copy of the file after editing.  From my standpoint, it's much less of a hassle to have this issue resolved - for this reason along with other annoying side effects.  I agree that the steps required are ridiculous and this is clearly buggy behavior in Windows7.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-02-13T16:58:57+00:00

    That's like telling someone to fix a basement water leak by adding a sump pump.

    When I read the answers the only thing that comes to my mind is "siriously?" are we still talking about rotating a picture or sending a man to the Moon? Just get a proper piece of software like IrfanView or something similar. You'll be able to rotate all you pictures, resize them and reduse the rusultant file size all in one go and much more...

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-03-27T17:32:32+00:00

    I have had this same problem for over 1 1/2 year, on a new laptop with Windows 7 and MS Office 2010.

    I have followed the various recommendation here, to no avail: all photos still arrive sideways and the rotate arrows are still inactive/grey, whether in MS Office or in Windows Gallery.

    Other than finding once again that Microsoft products have the user friendliness of a massive rock or bureaucracy, and consequently result in massive waste of time, I would appreciate if someone could suggest an effective solutions.

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