anyway, I quickly tried the first image locally, and while the re-orienting does indeed shrink the image. I don't think it shrinks it enough to be under the platerecognizer API limit (3MB IIRC):
image buffer length BEFORE sharp: 6538314 bytes
image buffer length AFTER sharp: 3762587 bytes
For comparison, here's the before/after re-orient size for a different, smaller image, where the plate was read:
image buffer length BEFORE sharp: 3723317 bytes
image buffer length AFTER sharp: 1962551 bytes
for reference, here's the image size/dimension limits: https://app.platerecognizer.com/upload-limit/
File Upload Error - Payload Too Large
File size must be lower than 3MB.
Recommended image resolution: 1024×768.
Recommended orientation: portrait.
Vehicle should be at least 15% of the total image area.
License plate should be readable by a human.
the resolution recommendation appears not to limit anything, I'm guessing it's a suggested minimum rather than a maximum, but the file size limit is definitely being triggered
If I do try to fix this, it'll probably be something along the lines of:
after the image has been re-oriented
see how much bigger the file is than the 3MB limit
scale it down down proportionally until it fits
A simpler approach might be to just scale it to 1024x768, but I'm guessing that would compromise readability in some cases, like you described
(none of this would apply to the Reported submission, only the image sent to the plate reading API)
I could have it only resize down to 1024x768 if the filesize would be bigger than 3MB, rather than always scaling it down. This would make it so that the plate-reading couldn't fail any more often than it already does
Notes from https://reportedcab.slack.com/archives/C9VNM3DL4/p1658594595486789?thread_ts=1657582859.783929&cid=C9VNM3DL4: