I’ve noticed that a significant portion — I’d say close to a third — of the videos I see posted on Facebook are reversed to a mirror image. Why would this be? How would one avoid this in posting one’s video?
I’m going to guess that it’s from using the front-facing camera on their smartphones. At least on my iPhone, that’s exactly what happens.
(I also imagine that there’s a way to set it so it doesn’t wind up shooting a reversed image, but I’ve never bothered to dig around to find it.)
Do you mean homemade videos or pirated videos?
Reversing pirated videos is one way that some people think prevents the automated copyright checkers from finding them.
And a lot of people do shoot “selfie” videos and pictures in their bathroom mirrors.
Because it defeats some automatic duplication detection. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Hell, the whole internet is 80-90% (number stolen somewhere) reposts, duplications, stolen content or plagiarism.
I’ll guess that this is the correct answer in most cases.
Apparently, images taken by the front-facing camera are displayed reversed because the human operator would otherwise get confused framing an image. (Manipulations via mirrors are also confusing.)
On my phone, a relatively cheap but recent Samsung, there is a menu item to de-reverse those images before saving them to the Gallery. If you neglect to make that the default, there are Apps that will de-reverse images for you. I’ll guess many are unaware of the reversing, or just don’t care.
My problem with that, though, is that the reversing only needs to be done in the display part of the software, and only for a real-time display. But in actuality, it seems that the camera itself is doing the reversing, causing all recordings to be reversed. And there’s absolutely no need for that. Suppose I’m using my camera because there’s something on my face that I want a better look at. In such a case, the reversal makes perfect sense to help me aim the camera correctly, but when I watch the video afterwards, why does that need to be reversed too?
Can someone offer an idea? I’m so tempted to blame it on lazy programmers, and I really don’t want to.
I think the idea presented above, that people reverse them to avoid be detected as copies, is the most likely explanation. Whether it works or not is another story, but I’ve certainly seen plenty of images and videos intentionally reversed; I’ve seen the original and it was posted correctly. Someone reversed it before reposting it, so it has nothing to do with selfie cameras.
I’ve clicked off the “Pictures as Previewed” option on my camera; and now my smartphone front-facing camera behaves exactly as you desire.
Why then isn’t this the default? — why did I have to switch the default setting to achieve this? My guess is this would be too disconcerting to many users: “Hey, my phone is broken! I take a photo but when viewing it later it’s reversed!??!?!?!”
So … maybe the current policy is best: except that perhaps the “problem” and the way to switch it should be better highlighted in the manual.
Thanks!