Comment 8 for bug 69577

There are two ways to rotate a JPEG: you can either re-encode the entire image, or you can set an EXIF tag that says "when you display this image, rotate it by 90 degrees.". f-spot does the latter, which I think is probably the less intrusive way.

The original problem reported was that a camera would not read the images after f-spot had rotated the images. If you remove the 'Software' EXIF tag that f-spot adds, does the camera still refuse to open the files? You can remove the tag by installing the exif package and running this command in a terminal window:

exif --ifd=0 --tag=0x0131 --remove filename.jpg

Replace filename.jpg with the name of the file you want to change. Best take a backup first.

If you would rather that f-spot never edited files, what would you like to happen when you want to rotate the file, which does require the contents of the file to change? A new version to be created?