I want to take portraits and upload them to a watch folder so ProPresenter will display them on the television monitor. Landscape format images work fine. How do I make portrait formatted images show upright automatically?
ASKED BY · Harold Williams · PORTSMOUTH · 18 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:00:21
Use FFmpeg with filters in a watch folder setup to process JPEG or MP4 files and automatically rotate them before they reach ProPresenter.
ProPresenter ignores EXIF rotation tags, so you need to rotate images with another tool before they enter the watch folder.
On Mac, use Preview with Command-R to rotate images in four positions and save; you can also manually rotate in ProPresenter's Media Bin Inspector Properties tab to set rotation 90/270 degrees.
Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.
From the transcript.
Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.
0:00Hey everyone, good morning. Welcome to Office Hours Global, where we answer your media and production questions. We've got a nice big stacked panel today. So if you have questions, throw them into askofficehours.global. That's askofficehours.global and we'll start to see those filter in. Also, if you're in a Mucana backend, you can throw them in there as well. But we've got a big panel, so let's get to some answers.
0:21Alexander, what's the first question? First up this morning is coming in from Harold Williams in Portsmouth. I want to take portraits and upload them to a watch folder. so ProPresenter will display them on the television monitor. Landscape format images work fine. How do I make portrait formatted images show upright automatically? All right, we'll go first to a man named Brady. That's a name you can trust.
0:43Yes. How are you, Harold? I've done something similar at work using FFmpeg. There are a bunch of filters you can throw that'll give it that look like you'll see on the news where they put a vertical video on. the input can be changed to JPEG versus mp4 I'll put a link to us what was it where was it a sub stack or something video stack exchange has a good link that instructs
1:12you on that whole thing and it's it can be set up to a watch folder so you just drop things in it process it and spits it out on the other side and makes it all ready for you Chris Sabato so it It sounds like from the question, what he's actually having trouble with is that he's taking portrait photos, and when he pulls them in, they're coming out landscape.
1:33And if that's what's happening, I think we need to know more information about the process because that shouldn't happen, right? That metadata should be embedded in the camera when you take it, and it should persist throughout the process. So any modern camera, any modern Mac and Windows that should just work. And so I think we would need to know more to kind of figure out where the hole is in your process.
2:02I'm doing a quick search on some forums about this particular issue. You're not alone here. It looks like ProPresenter ignores the EXIF tag that actually rotates, that tells the camera to rotate it. And so what you need to do is rotate it with something else before it gets into that hot folder. But Fenwick might know something about this. No, I'm just going to totally agree with you.
2:24That's clearly what's happening is that ProPresenter is designed to fill screens. And somewhere along the way, either A, programmers didn't understand XF tags, or B, they decided to ignore them. But I would think that there would be some sort of way to make a, actually I know there is, to make like a watch folder where instead of just throwing them straight into ProPresenter,
2:51you could probably throw them into a subfolder that would go, oh, I need to rotate this image. But also, come on, it's not that hard. Just rotate it. Yeah, I think the other, you might be able to use some AI coding assistant to help you with, okay, if the camera has the rotate exif tag, rotate the image and then resave it out as already rotated before it gets in there as part of the pipeline.
3:22So you could, in theory, throw all of your pictures into that preliminary folder and then have it come over. Bill? This is just an aesthetic thing for me. But every time I'm watching television, I see somebody who took a vertical video when they did the old traditional. We're going to blow it up and map the vertical over a horizontal, slightly out of focus or majorly out of focus version of it.
3:47I just think that looks old now. And it really bothers me. And it says you didn't, for some reason, you didn't know you were going to have to use both vertical and horizontal. You didn't prepare for it. And I don't know why, but I was thinking about that in terms of 70 millimeter IMAX and the fact that it's really more a square kind of format than it is wide now.
4:09So there's contemporary things where people are not necessarily shooting the way they shot before. Instead of 100% horizontal or 100% vertical, more and more people, I think, are cheating and shooting almost like a red cross symbol and trying to keep all their major content in the center of it. And I just wonder whether anybody else was having the same reaction I do to that look and thinking it really dates a piece of content badly if it looks like you didn't think anything through before you shot.