Image Editing: Orientation-aware rotation icons

[celloexpressions]

Having just processed a massive set of images and needing to rotate several of them, I noticed a small issue with the way the WordPress image editor's rotation icons work. They're generally much better than the standard rotation arrows you'd normally see, providing a visual of an image being rotated one way or another from portrait to landscape. But if you're looking at a landscape image that needs to rotate one way or the other, it's somewhat disorienting trying to decide which button to push, since you're essentially rotating it one more time past the orientation indicated in the icon. By contextually adjusting these icons to reflect the orientation of the image in the editor, we could eliminate an extra cognitive step during the image editing process (see proposed screenshots).

Probably the easiest way to go about fixing this would be to add a class for the image's orientation somewhere in a container div, then add some css to rotate these buttons when the image is already landscape, so that they indicate that clicking would make them rotate into portrait orientation.

[melchoyce]

Awesome enhancement idea. Big +1.

[melchoyce]

Errr didn't mean to set myself as owner. Sorry about that.

[kirasong]

This sounds great!

[bendoh]

What about when the image is square and has no definitive orientation? Neither pair of icons are technically correct in that particular case. Would it be appropriate to use a third pair of icons that simply designate generic rotation rather than a specific orientation switch?

[celloexpressions]

This remains a valid usability enhancement with design sign-off. We just need a developer to create a patch that technically implements context-sensitive image-rotation icons.