90 Degrees of Separation
Recently I’ve been noticing images in email newsletters that are not oriented properly, like this one. I didn’t understand why businesses would send out emails without first rotating images 90 degrees.
And then it happened to me.
I had decided to cut and paste newsletter copy into an email for approval, and was told, “The only change I’d make is to be sure the image is facing the right way.” I said to myself, “What? I just rotated that image.”
Well, the problem occurred when I first imported the image and then corrected the image rotation (after the upload). If I had rotated the image prior to importing it, there would have been no problem. You can always be sure that your images will appear properly positioned if they are corrected on your local computer instead of in the cloud, where most email newsletters and website edits occur. And then, to ensure that your images appear correctly, send a test through multiple email clients (your iPhone, Android, Outlook, webmail, etc.)
The short technical explanation of why:
This error affects email more than websites. A website’s content management system (like Drupal or WordPress) changes the image rotation via Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). While this works for most modern web browsers, email clients are more fragmented (there are more varieties) and do not render more modern CSS properly.