"ya know, i learned something today" . . . . .
this is a well known issue with vbulliten software.
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=314587
their opinion seems to be:
"it is not really our problem, it is misbehaving software on mobile phones (they specify iPhones), but we will fix it if there is enough demand."
the issue with that appears to be that it is not an issue with a bunch of their customers. only a few seem to view it as an issue, which means that their paradigm for prioritizing bugs leaves this behind, since it doesnt effect a lot of their customers.
personally, i dont have an issue with either of their positions: 1) it isn't our fault, 2) we will fix it when enough customers prioritize it.
i will note that, based on previous experience, understanding the problem is usually 80% of the effort involved. once you really understand the problem, you usually understand how the fix works, and it is often most cost effective to just fix it.
if whomever is the maintainer of the software here goes over to the vbulliten site, and tries to up vote this issue, it can only help. the issue will be that any likely fix will not be available for the version that is used here.
these issues are, as we used to say, above my pay grade.
now, the "quick" solution here is to load the images into a photo/image app, orientate them the way you want, and re-export them to reset the data stored in the image. "photo" on my mac worked, and i am sure there are a lot of windows software that would also solve the problem.
hopefully this solution, such as it is, will propagate through the site enough to deal with the problem.
