When a student submits an assignment with the incorrect orientation, it is easy to rotate it. However, after rotating, the "T" button is unavailable. This was not always the case. Any thoughts on why this is or how I can change it back?
Hello @kathyharder,
I have unforunate information to share with you. Back in the middle of November 2025, a faculty member brought this behavior/experience to my attention and I was able to duplicate it.
After duplicating it, I reported the behavior/experience to Support (both Tier 1 and Tier 2 were able to duplicate it) and it was escalated to their engineers. Their engineers told me that the ability to annotate a student's submission with text that has been rotated by a grader is no longer supported.
-Doug
Thank you, @kathyharder for your well-illustrated explanation of this problem, and @dbrace for sharing what you learned about it. I can now stop wasting time trying to figure out why this is not working.
Thanks,@dbrace. I appreciate the quick response. Do you think there is any point in requesting that this change be reversed, or were you told that this is how it's going to be from now on?
You are welcome, @kathyharder.
My recommendation would be to:
I am unsure how willing they would be to reverse the functionality.
Well, that really unfortunate. It doesn't make grading any easier.
We have faculty that used to use the rotate function frequently. This is a huge step backwards. Please add this feature back in future updates.
This is discouraging news, but I'm grateful for this post so I know why we're not able to get it to work.
Shoot! They need to be ADDING functionality, not taking it away!
This is a problem for several of my students' submissions, and I really hope Canvas will fix this issue. I did a few pictures and scans myself on my iPhone. It seems like if the camera is held vertically (portrait), the pictures and scans show up vertically in Speed Grader. The pictures and scans I did with my camera horizontal (landscape) were not correctly oriented in Speed Grader. Has anyone else found this to be true? I feel like there probably is more to this issue than just the way the photographer holds the phone. Maybe the workaround for now is to ensure our students take vertical pictures?
Sadly, the way students hold their phones doesn't seem to fix this problem. Has anyone else figured out how to get student submissions vertical so that the annotation tools will work?
I would like to echo what the other instructors on here are saying—it is incredibly inconvenient to no longer be able to rotate and annotate student submissions for both myself as an instructor and for students looking for feedback. I hope Canvas reverts the SpeedGrader back to its original capabilities.
See below.
@kathyharder @dbrace @EmilyDale97596988 @rkastend @sderry2 @clpatter @April_Sylvester @drrainbo
I would reach out to Canvas Support and push back on this no longer being supported. The more tickets they have about it, the more likely they will fix it. From my understanding, they were trying to fix an issue where people would annotate and then rotate (which seems like a silly order of operations) and then annotations becoming broken. In fixing that, they also removed the totally logical process of rotate and then annotate.
As it is now functioning "properly", this issue can be reported as a UX Bug (good to include in the title of the ticket/email) because:
…existing functionality behaves as intended from a technical standpoint, but the design, layout, or user flow causes confusion, frustration, or inefficiency. It makes the product harder to use, even though it “works.”
That quote above is from the backend documentation for support providers to reference when determining if something is a UX bug.
Please let your voices be heard so we can get this fixed before any more instructors need to suffer through annotating sideways submissions.
One of my students whose submissions were always sideways found a workaround. She has an Android phone. She takes a picture of her submission with her phone's camera. Then, she goes to the assignment and uploads the picture from her gallery. Previously, she—and all my students—opened the assignment, chose Submit, took the picture in Canvas, and uploaded it. Maybe this can help with other students?
Well, that didn't work for another student. This seems to be a problem with Android phones and not iPhones. A Canvas support person gave this explanation and suggestion:
Modern smartphones save the orientation of a photo as a "tag" rather than physically rotating the pixels. While the phone's gallery reads that tag and shows it upright, the DocViewer within Canvas often ignores it, displaying the "raw" horizontal data from the camera sensor.
I would suggest to ask the students, to take a picture on their phones outside Canvas, and take a screenshot of the picture from their gallery to ensure the picture won't be rotated once they upload it to the assignment.
I will try it with my students…
This is utter garbage. When I have students turning in math homework online and they accidentally scan it sideways, I can no longer give feedback on the assignments. How am I supposed to point out the error in their work? Type a comment in the comment box? "In problem 2(a), step 3, you accidentally dropped the negative sign in the 2,3 entry in the matrix." And we are going to expect a student to read my comment and understand where I am talking about in their submission?
Honestly, for math teachers, this just made Canvas unusable. I am looking into alternatives for homework submissions. I am advocating hard that our campus drops our contract with Instructure over this change.
I wonder if using Google Drive's "Scan Document" option would help this issue. The scanned file would be a PDF file rather than an image. To use this function, you have to have the Google Drive app on your phone. You open Google Drive and click the + to add a file. Then, select "Scan Document" from the options. There are other apps out there that do similar things if your school does not use Google.
AND you cannot rotate after notating anything on the screen. So much for VIEW feedback.
On March 3, I received this in an email from Instructure Support:
I understand you have concerns regarding annotating rotated documents. Taking a look at this today, it looks like our engineering teams are actively investigating possible solutions to this request. Thank you for your continued patience and understanding.
Maybe there is hope that SpeedGrader will be useful again!
The most recent update is hopeful!
Recently, our Product and Engineering teams have opened a project to add the functionality of being able to annotate rotated files back into Canvas. We are also in the process of updating Speedgrader so they are working on making sure the new functionality will be compatible with the new version of Speedgrader as well as address the previous issue of rotations being a global change for all users. It will take some time, but they are working on adding it back to Canvas.
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