Rotating and flipping
A quarter turn, written to the file on disk. This is the one part of AssetScout that changes the contents of your files, so it is worth reading before you use it.
The four items
When everything you have selected is a picture or a video, four more items appear at the foot of the menu:
| Rotate Left | A quarter turn counterclockwise. |
| Rotate Right | A quarter turn clockwise. |
| Flip Horizontal | Mirrored left to right. |
| Flip Vertical | Mirrored top to bottom. |
The thumbnail is redrawn as soon as the file has been written.
There is no undo
These four change the file on disk, and no copy is kept.
Turning a picture right and then left brings it back as it was. A video does not come back untouched: it is encoded again each time, so each turn costs it a little quality.
Types that cannot be turned
macOS reads more picture formats than it can write. WebP is the one people meet: the system decodes it perfectly well but has no encoder for it, so a turned WebP could never be saved back into its own file.
AssetScout checks before it offers the menu items, so a file that could only fail does not get an item that is bound to fail.
What it does to the month
Writing a file makes the file system stamp it with today's modification date. While the grid is grouped by Last Modified, that would silently move the item you just turned into the current month.
So the app asks — once per scan, before the first rotation — what should happen: the changed files can move to the month of their new date, or stay where they are. Your answer is used for the rest of that scan.
Grouped by Creation Date, nothing moves and nothing is asked: the capture date inside the file is not touched by turning it.
When one of them fails
The files that could be turned are turned. One failure does not stop the rest, and the message that follows names each file it failed on with its own reason — see Messages, and what they mean.