What rotation button? Thunderbird doesn't have one.

Or maybe you have an add-on that set this up for you?

You are right. I have Thunderbird set to display attached photos in the message body. They are tipped however only when sent via an iPhone. When I open the attachment (*.jpg*) , the default program is Windows Live Photo Gallery, which has the rotation toggle greyed out. I guess I could choose another photo viewing program as the default, but I would like to view directly in the message body of Thunderbird.

There are several add-ons that can rotate and re-size images in place. Go to Tools|Add-ons|Search in Thunderbird and look for "image zoom".

IPhone in particular can tell which way up it is and embed that data into a photograph, but I suspect that it is done in a way that makes sense to other Apple devices and little else.

Thanks. That works for me! Thank goodness for add-ons.

 It must be something lacking in the cell phone OS that doesn't accommodate Windows apps. I could get it to rotate in Adobe Elements, but that is too much trouble to use to just rotate photos. . It doesn't make any difference whether the photographer orients the camera one way or the other, the image still displays horizontally on my desk top computer.

I'm surprised that others haven't had this trouble. Thanks again.