| FWIW, if they did that, it had beeter be an option, because it would almost certainly slow the camera down.
I haven't found the use of the orientation field to be an issue because of my workflow, and you might consider whether altering your workflow would similarly make the problem go away.
For one thing, my original images (which are all RAW, although that's not actually relevant here) are *only* ever seen by one program (ACDSee Pro), which does understand the orientation field. I do whatever processing I want with those images then archive them away and seldom actually use them for anything. Instead, I generate medium resolution "proofs" (1200x1800 pixels, sufficient for web viewing and 4x6 prints) and use these for most purposes. Those are the ones I post to Flickr/Zenfolio/Facebook/etc, those are the ones I email to friends, etc. It's extremely rare that there is something I want to do with a picture that my proof isn't good enough for, and in those cases, I go back to my original and generate a full sized image (perhaps TIFF if I *really* care about IQ). And any file generated by ACDSee Pro - whether medium resolution proof or full size TIF - is automatically rotated "for real". So none of the images I ever share with anyone else depend on the orientation field. And it's also only these proofs or occasional full-size TIFF that ever get viewed by any application other than ACDSee.
So whether or not you went to that exact system or not, it seems you could benefit from giving some thought to what exactly you are trying accomplish when viewing images with programs that don't understand orientation, and if there is another way to accomplish that task. |