I purchased a new Nikon D70 camera.  After the purchase I decided to upgrade 
to GIMP 2.0.1.  The Nikon sets the orientation of the photo in the exif so 
that photos taken vertically will automatically rotate vertical when viewed 
instead of showing horizontal.  An untouched vertical photo viewed in 
kuickshow will also auto orient from the exif information however GIMP will 
not auto orient the photos.  When I manually turned a photo using GIMP I 
quickly discovered that my 2-3M photo file was reduced to 400-500k with a 
significant image quality loss.  Also, GIMP did not alter the exif information 
which caused kuickshow to still rotate the photo rendering the GIMP 
modification useless.  There are several recommendations I would like to see 
to fix this issue.  First, why won't GIMP read the exif information and auto 
rotate the vertical photos?  Second, there are applications out there that 
will read the exif data and rotate the image with no quality loss to the image 
using the standard jpeg libraries so why can't GIMP do the same?  The 
application I am now using to accomplish this is Jhead.  Jhead uses jpegtran 
to accomplish the rotation with no image loss.  Third, since digital cameras 
are quickly replacing film at all levels why isn't a module developed similar 
to gimp-pal which is a toolkit strictly devoted to digital cameras that would 
have such features as the above auto rotation, red eye correction, noise 
reduction, vingette removal, etc?  In other words everything ready at hand 
that a digital photographer can already expect from a windows application? 
 
Thanks