The effects of rotating images in Window XP

A few years ago, I experimented with Windows XP's "Image and Fax Viewer", to see what repeated rotations, numbering hundreds and thousands, would do to a jpeg image. Each rotation would cause the image to be automatically saved, which caused substantial degradation to the image. The procedure was automated by writing a vbscript which interacted with the image viewer. These are some images from the original tests.

Emilee Cox is a girl that once sent over 30,000 text messages from her phone in a month. I thought it only right to rotate her image the same amount of times, but as you can see from the results, she didn't even last for a thousand.

source: http://emileecox.blogspot.com/

Bill Gates proved a tough nut to crack. Still discernible after thirty thousand rotations.

With entropy increasing, so did file size, as more and more chaotic detail had to be compressed.

Contents of this blog post were originally published: March 05, 2009