Photo Gallery distorts JPG aspect ratio!

[MichaelRichardBoyer]

I've seen many posts in the discussion groups regarding distorted images when
displayed in Photo Gallery when I started to search for other people with my
problem, BUT all of them deal with faded, fussy, and poorly rendered images.
None of them talked abou my problem.

I've gone through a several week effort of scanning in family photos for
digital archiving purposes. After scanning them, I've carefully cropped
them. As a result many of the JPG images have non-standard pixel proportions
(aspect ratio), for example 473 x 673. When many of these non-standard JPGs
are displayed in Photo Gallery, Slide-Show, Media Center, as both full images
AND as thumbnails they are visually squeezed horizontally making all the
people in the pictures look like they have lost 50 pounds :-) Now as much as
I wish I were 50 pounds lighter, I want it to be the result of REAL weight
loss, not a bug in Vista.

To make sure this is Vista related, I downloaded Picassa 2 from Google and
all the JPGs are displayed normally with absolutely no visual distortion.

This first appeared on my HP DV9010us laptop which I upgraded from Win XP
Pro to Vista Premium so I thought it might be related to an "upgrade" issue,
but I just bought myself a brand new HP DV9347cl laptop with Vista Ultimate
Pre-installed and the problem appears there as well.

Has anyone else seen JPGs visually distorted in the form of squeezing the
displayed aspect ratio? Is Microsoft aware of this issue? Any solutions out
there other than using another 3rd party product? THANKS!

[Adam Albright]

About all I can suggest is if you set up a Goggle Picassa account
where you can share photos, give us the URL so we can download some of
the images and see what happends on our system. I have all the top of
the line tools like Photoshop and I'll be happy to let you know what
if anything is wrong. For what its worth I work with both still and
video images 24/7 (seems like it anyway) and I don't see any of the
distortion you're reporting. In fact Vista does image handling way
better than XP.

[MichaelRichardBoyer]

Thanks for your response and willingness to investigate my problem, Adam! I
created a Public Picassa Web Album:

http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelr...eryDistortions

and uploaded 7 images. 3 of them are original images as they were scanned
and cropped and which display normally in all graphic applications EXCEPT
Vista Photo gallery and Media Center. Then I used the new "Snipping Tool"
that comes with Vista to snip the actual screen displays from Vista Photo
Gallery so that you can see what I am seeing. 3 of the snips are of the same
3 original images. The 4th snip shows the same images with the same visual
distortions when displayed as thumbnails in Photo Gallery. I'm baffled!
Thanks for any help or insight you can provide!

[Adam Albright]

I downloaded the images wanting to see if I they would be be distored
on my system. I first opened the originals in my copy of Photo Gallery
then in Photoshop. I see the distortion which changes the width from
103 pixels to 85. Next I wanted to see what happened if I restored the
distored image in Photoshop to it's original size of 103x144 then view
that new copy in Photo Galley and some other viewers to see if I got
similar distortion like you did. I didn't. The restored distored
images appear exactly like the orignial does on my system with the
correct aspect ratio.

I then made another copy in Photoshop and did some cropping of my own.
Again viewing in my copy of Photo Gallery no matter what I do to the
photo it gets faithfully reproduced in my copy of Photo Galley so it
seems it must be something local to your system but what, I have no
idea either. It is strange.

Just curious, what happens if you change the width of the right window
plane in Photo Gallery? If you slowly hover your mouse between the
left and right panes the cursor should change to a double headed
arrow. If you hold your left mouse button down you can drag the
boundry to make the right pane large or smaller thus increasing or
decreasing the space and making more or less images appear in a row.
Does that change anything? Or changing the resolution your monitor is
set to?

[MichaelRichardBoyer]

Thanks again for taking the time to look into this for me, Adam! At least
you were able to confirm that Photo Gallery does NOT display the images
properly. I am not going nuts :-)

I've been a software engineer at various Defense contractors for years and
am currently traveling the country providing software development training
for many large commercial and government software development firms. I've
been working with computers (my first an Atari 400) for decades and this
definitely looks like a Vista BUG to me! No, playing with the various window
display proportions does not affect the distortion of the displayed images in
either thumbnail nor full view mode. Any graphic functions that appear to
use the internal Windows Vista API interface to display the graphic images
seems to suffer the distortion. It is only 3rd party applications like
Picassa that properly display them.

My educated guess about what is causing the problem is that Windows captures
literally dozens of "properties" about the various files it has in a
filesystem, especially graphic images, which can be viewed by looking at the
"Details" TAB of a file's property sheet. I think these distorted files have
a property with is causing the distortion. Your tests would confirm this
since after you editted and re-saved the images using Photoshop, the problem
disappeared. If We had an easy way to compare the "properties" of the file
both before and after saving, we may be able to determine the cause, but
unfortunately it would not fix the bug.

How does one report something like this to Microsoft "officially"? Do you
know!

[Adam Albright]

Sure, anytime. From what I heard, don't know if it is true or not,
Microsoft doesn't want or accept bug reports from the general public,
only from their beta testers which were the clowns that tested Vista
and didn't notice things like this in the first place.

Figures, but par for course for Microsoft. Other vendors are often
glad to hear about product bugs. Once I was even recruited by the
programmers to field test a bug fix for something I found in some
encryption application. Every few days they emailed me a new version
to try out. Not Microsoft. As arrogant as they are they will develop a
"hot fix" for some issue, then put a page up about it on their
Knowledgebase then say sorry, you can't have it unless and until you
call first and try to explain why you may need it.

Maybe somebody will hit Gates in the face with another pie.

Also see the eye opening "finding of Fact" from U. S. District Judge
Jackson on the anti-trust law suit filed against Microsoft by the
Federal Government linked on the same page.

In summary the Judge had this to say:

"Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft's actions have
conveyed to every enterprise with the potential to innovate in the
computer industry. Through its conduct toward Netscape, IBM, Compaq,
Intel, and others, Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its
prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that
insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition
against one of Microsoft's core products. Microsoft's past success in
hurting such companies and stifling innovation deters investment in
technologies and businesses that exhibit the potential to threaten
Microsoft. The ultimate result is that some innovations that would
truly benefit consumers never occur for the sole reason that they do
not coincide with Microsoft's self-interest.

[Andrew Chaikin]

Ok, I was just having similar issues to what you were describing. I had an image that when viewing in any other application, Paint, Any Browser, ... the image opened up with the correct aspect ratio, however in Microsoft Photo Gallery, and also the windows explorer icons the image was shown to be stretched in the horizontal direction.

I don't know if it is the same issue as yours are not but the symptoms sound identical. Well I just figured out what was going wrong in my case. I noticed that the dpi resolution was different in both directions. One was set to 180dpi, and the other was 72dpi.

I use Gimp (freeware like photoshop) and changed the settings so that both were the same. After that, the image aspect ratio displayed correctly. So it seems there is a bug in Windows photo gallery that it can not handle a difference in dpi and correctly show the aspect ratio based on the image sizing.

I would check first in your photo if you have the same issue where the dpi settings are different in both directions, and see if that cures your problem. If not, hopefully you'll be able to solve your problem soon.