What causes Windows Photo Viewer to stretch an image on occasion?

Question

I had an image on my harddrive of Dusk Maiden of Amnesia which in the thumbnails looked perfectly fine

however when i went to view it in Windows Photo Viewer to see how large it was the image's width got stretched out and i think the height shrunk, it did this regardless if Windows Photo Views was maximized or not

Maximized

Regular (seems like the image got pasted in with the origin set to be in the negatives however you can see the bottom are is smaller and you can't see desktop icontext in it)

now the images worked fine after i re-saved the image, as you can see with the thumbnail in explorer it was fine and it was still fine when i opened it up to re-save it (i used Fireworks), the image itself i downloaded off the web from a random site from google (was searching for images to use as cover art in iTunes), none of the other images in that folder did it.

i have came across this kind of thing a view times and am wondering why this happens? i've only noticed this in Windows 7

Solution

Taking a look at this post, the stretching is caused by the X and Y Resolution being incorrect. Windows Photo Viewer uses X and Y Resolution to display the images and thus it comes out stretched, while most other programs rely on the image width and height instead (including Windows Explorer).

It's probably caused by rotating the image with other programs that don't look at X and Y Resolution. I don't have any programs that reproduce this, but I've been able to replicate the problem by editing the metadata of an image and removing or changing the X Resolution but keeping everything else the same. It's squashed on Windows Photo Viewer but not on Google Chrome or IrfanView or the preview on Windows Explorer.

I'm a year too late, but to fix it, you can either add the metadata back in, or save the image with some photo editor or remove the X and Y Resolution altogether.

Comments

[and31415]

Have you got a link to the original image or a link to another which has the same issue?

[Memor-X]

@and31415 nope, i download images on a separate computer and transfer them to my main computer which the screenshots came from, even so when i went to first make this question SU was refusing to take my questions, after reading about this question ban and how it will be lifted after an automated review i tried again for the next few days but was still banned so i gave up, i only just remembered about this when i found the screenshots still on my memory stick and checked to see if i was still banned so i can't even look up my browser history for the link because so much time has passed

[LarryBud]

Mine does it with images right out of my phone if they are taken in portrait mode.