Can I make a request that this ONLY be done for 90, 180, or 270° rotations? Anything that needs a crop or transparency should require actual human thought.

In T35186#1636134, @AdamCuerden wrote:

Can I make a request that this ONLY be done for 90, 180, or 270° rotations? Anything that needs a crop or transparency should require actual human thought.

Hi @AdamCuerden, this task is for the implementation in MediaWiki. What is finally enabled on Commons/ Wikipedia/ ... will be subject to another discussion. Also I think it would be a nice feature if you could somehow edit your files before uploading, don't you think?

@Rillke

That's what's image editing programs are for. I think it's actually kind of dangerous: Each change degrades an image slightly, and arbitrary rotation - in the absence of things like guides and such - are likely to be too approximate. And heaven help us if we allow arbitrary cropping on upload - we already have a problem with engravings and such being inappropriately cropped in ways that kills a lot of their reusability. (e.g. removing the edges, meaning they can no longer be reproduced in their original form; removing text that was a part of the engraving (and often not documenting it) etc.

And that's not even getting into the horrors that could be done with colour editing. You generally only have one shot to get colours right. Get them wrong, and if you don't have the original, you can often have burnt out too much of the image.

The ability to edit before uploading exists. GIMP is freely available on every major platform save mobiles - which would be unable to do any serious image editing anyway - , and free. On uploading, where people are unlikely to spend more than a few minutes on it, we should only offer the basics: rotation as a multiple of 90°. Anything else should only ever be offered after uploading.

It rather seems like the scope of this is growing into something the community doesn't want or need, when all we really need is the ability to correct simple 90° rotations. Hell, even just the ability to set an orientation code in the EXIF might be enough.

See http://www.daveperrett.com/articles/2012/07/28/exif-orientation-handling-is-a-ghetto/ - it's not perfectly supported by every website, but Wikipedia handles it quite well, and it's not like we haven't led things before. OGG support was almost non-existent before Wikipedia.

In T35186#1641997, @AdamCuerden wrote:

It rather seems like the scope of this is growing into something the community doesn't want or need, when all we really need is the ability to correct simple 90° rotations. Hell, even just the ability to set an orientation code in the EXIF might be enough.

Agree.
This bug is only for the rotate function itself - to replace this function with the currently broken bot. The bot will be switched off soon (it is just fixed with some ugly hacks) (currently there are thousands of requests to rotate files every month). :-)

In T35186#1641997, @AdamCuerden wrote:

It rather seems like the scope of this is growing into something the community doesn't want or need, when all we really need is the ability to correct simple 90° rotations. Hell, even just the ability to set an orientation code in the EXIF might be enough.

As stated earlier in the comment thread, 90 degree rotations can be performed losslessly on many formats (the vast majority of our originals, when you look at the distribution of file types), including JPEG without having to use EXIF rotation. jpegtran is what allows lossless EXIF-free rotation of JPEGs.

In T35186#1642142, @Gilles wrote:

As stated earlier in the comment thread, 90 degree rotations can be performed losslessly on many formats (the vast majority of our originals, when you look at the distribution of file types), including JPEG without having to use EXIF rotation. jpegtran is what allows lossless EXIF-free rotation of JPEGs.

Agreed that jpegtran and the equivalents for other formats are better; just pointing out the EXIF option as a possible fallback if that's unfeasable.

@brion: May i ask what is the status of this? :-)

Change 250291 had a related patch set uploaded (by Ori.livneh):
include mediawiki::multimedia on all application servers

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/250291

Since the migration to HHVM, several things have changed:

• Request resource limits are now identical across all application servers.
• CPU utilization on the API cluster is a third of what it was a year ago.

If we simply install multimedia packages on all application servers (as I'm proposing we do in Ib5dee0fce), the end result would be a world in which every application server is in principle capable of serving every kind of request. I think that this would make our software stack substantially simpler to manage and would pave the way for elastic load-balancing and SLAs.

Once Ib5dee0fce is merged, I think the next logical step is to simply enable the imagerotate API (in its current, synchronous form) while monitoring load.

There is a risk that the load generated by image rotation requests will be too high and that we will need to disable image rotation once again, which would no doubt be frustrating to users. But I think there is a very good chance that we will handle the load just fine, and that it is worth a shot.

@ori, just for me getting things right, it is okay now to do multimedia operations synchronously on the application servers? No queue required because the resource limits are now identical across all application servers and there is less load on them and not desired because it would complicate managing the software stack substantially?

That aside, I like Brion V.'s suggested interface "filetransform". It's not so narrow in scope.

From 105877, the imagerotate API module is disabled on beta just like production:

In T105877#1466397, @hashar wrote:

CommonSettings.php has:

// T35186: turn off incomplete feature action=imagerotate
$wgAPIModules['imagerotate'] = 'ApiDisabled';

Disabled because of T35186: Provide a well-performing API to rotate an image.

If one want to enable it for testing purpose, I guess it is all about adding the setting in a -labs.php file.

Because of the recent changes in session handling/tokens the bot is broken. I am unable, even after multiple hours of work (i don't have time to spend moor hours for this), to detect the problem. Which mean rotatebot is no longer rotating files and the backlog will become bigger every day: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_requiring_rotation_by_bot

If the bot is getting logged out, it's probably not handling cookies right. (Use a standard library, don't try to do it by hand.) If it's not getting logged out but getting token errors, it's probably not urlencoding request parameters properly.

Unfortunately, i don't have time to re-write it / porting to a standard library. And i think it is time now to include this function in mw, especially because it is highly used.

I attempted to fix up how the rotation bot does logins. https://bitbucket.org/Steinsplitter/rotatebot/pull-requests/2

Thanks but unfortunately it does not work. The whole code needs a re-write. The best would be to port it to MW (the function in MW api exist yet, but not compatible with WMF cluster yet).

Hmm, I see your bot uploaded rotated versions of a few files today – have you gotten it to work after all?

In T35186#2033230, @matmarex wrote:

Hmm, I see your bot uploaded rotated versions of a few files today – have you gotten it to work after all?

I am current merging the bot to a stable library (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Peachy).

Update: Bot is back again. Now rotation of bigger files and .tif(f) is supported.

Update2: But of course this bug should be fixed contemporary.

Change 250291 abandoned by Ori.livneh:
include mediawiki::multimedia on all application servers

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/250291

FYI: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Categories/Commons#Allow_file_rotation_on_commons

The biggest problem with this patch is that it came out of a request to
allow rotations in multiples of 90°. Commons does not need or want anything
besides that, because you don't want eyeballed rotations, and 90° multiples
are about the only ones you can do eyeballing that are worth doing.
Anything else you want people taking the image to proper image editing
software, with guidelines and care.

PLEASE DON'T give us something that you think would be better, when,
practically, all it does is encourage slow degredation of image as people
go "is 1°' enough... no... try another degree..."

Image curation and a free rotation tool are not compatible.

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Any updates on this?

Sometimes, the rotation sought is not around the center point, but around the central vertical or horizontal axis (sometimes called mirroring, flipping, or flopping). This should be doable losslessly. See also c:MediaWiki talk:Gadget-RotateLink.js#Mirroring as Rotation.

This seems something that is much more doable now that we have Shellbox. I reviewed the current code in ApiImageRotate and would suggest the following modifications:

• Only allow a single file to be operated on at once (can skip using ApiPageSet)
• Initially, set some max size limit of files that can be rotated. This can be raised over time as the API module proves stable.
• Given this has really never been enabled widely, we should rename it to ApiFileRotate.
• Add a change tag like mw-file-rotate to all uploads that use this.
• Make all the various $handler->rotate() calls be Shellbox-compatible by using BoxedCommand.

Happy to review/mentor/guide someone in working on this.

It seems CropTool already supports rotation (maybe this should be advertised better?), I'm slightly hesitant to add more to mediawiki and bloat it. MediaWiki is not really an image editing tool.