how do you rotate the image after capturing the photo?

The rotation of the captured image depends on the target rotation of the ImageCapture use case. By default, when it isn’t set by the application, it is equal to Display.getRotation(), where Display is the default display at the time the ImageCapture use case is created.

This means that you need to updated the ImageCapture‘s target rotation every time the display’s orientation changes, e.g. when the device is physically rotated from portrait to landscape.

I’m assuming your activity has a locked orientation (?). In this case, you can use an OrientationEventListener to continuously get updates on the device’s rotation, and then update the use case’s target rotation accordingly.

val orientationEventListener = object : OrientationEventListener(this) {
    override fun onOrientationChanged(orientation: Int) {
        if (orientation == OrientationEventListener.UNKNOWN_ORIENTATION) {
            return
        }

        val rotation = when (orientation) {
            in 45 until 135 -> Surface.ROTATION_270
            in 135 until 225 -> Surface.ROTATION_180
            in 225 until 315 -> Surface.ROTATION_90
            else -> Surface.ROTATION_0
        }

        imageCapture.targetRotation = rotation
    }
}

You should start/stop the orientationEventListener when the Activity’s lifecycle is started/stopped, this also matches when the camera’s started/stopped. You can see an example of this here.

You can also learn more about CameraX’s use cases and rotation in the official documentation.