I have come across a strange issue placing portrait images in Sketch. Myself and my team members have never experienced it before. The photos were captured on a Samsung Galaxy S10+ phone camera, sent to my laptop (Macbook Pro Monterey V12.6) via email (Gmail to Outlook) and then dropped from the computer into the Sketch document.
They looked fine at first and then the next day reopening the Sketch doc, all the portrait images had been rotated and stretched to fill the portrait aspect ratio. If I drop them back in, they will usually also be stretched. Deleting and and dropping onto the background sometimes works temporarily but can appear stretched again after resizing onto the artboard. Sometimes if I zoom in and out of the document, they will rotate within the aspect ratio temporarily.
I would really like to use these images in Sketch but may have to resort to product images or Figma.
Welcome to our community! We’re thrilled to have you on board and appreciate your initiative in sharing the challenges you’ve encountered.
It seems like you’re facing some unusual behaviors with pictures imported from your Android phone, with random stretching and rotation. That’s indeed an intriguing situation.
Understanding the intricacies of this scenario will require a bit more investigation into the document itself. To assist you better, could you please share a copy of the document and the photos you’ve used? This will enable us to delve deeper into the issue and provide you with more accurate guidance.
For your privacy and security, we recommend sending this information via email to productsupport@sketch.com. However, if you feel comfortable, sharing it here is also an option.
We will do our best to restore your user experience.
While we are still reviewing the issue reported by Freja, it’s important to note that sometimes, images may have a rotation factor set in their metadata, which can cause them to appear rotated when viewed in certain apps or platforms.
I haven’t personally encountered this issue within Sketch, but I’ve come across similar instances related to image orientation and metadata in other applications.
As a tip, when faced with this scenario, it’s worth exploring whether adjusting the image orientation before importing it into Sketch could help. This can be done using image editing software or by directly modifying the image’s metadata. The specific steps for adjusting image orientation will vary depending on the software or tool you’re using.
But as I mentioned before, we are still investigating this case, and I’m happy to share our findings here if Freja feels comfortable with it.
I’m sorry to hear you’ve run into this issue. As my colleague mentioned we’re gathering info to identify how this happens.
Can you help us with some additional information? It’d be super helpful if you can share a sample file with artboards that show this problem to our support email productsupport@sketch.com and, if possible, the original photo too, so we can take a look at the metadata of the image file.
We’ve identified the problem and the team will look into it. It’s triggered by metadata on bitmap images produced by certain devices. Not all images will trigger the distortion and how the image is affected will also depend on the device that produced the image.
For example, we were able to reproduce the issue with photos from an old iPhone, but photos from a newer phone or photos from stock services were unaffected by this.
If you see this happen the workaround is to reprocess the image. You can do that by repositioning the image in Sketch. After repositioning it, save the file again and that will solve the problem.
If you know you have images that will trigger the issue, you can also use bitmap editing software (open → re-export) but a quicker way is to upload the image to a mail application. For example, open Apple mail, create a new message and drop the affected image. Then copy the image from there into Sketch and this will ensure the image will behave as expected.
