Hi Evan,
This problem seems to happen with Samsung and LG smartphones. I think you are right that the phone is storing the rotation info in some sort of non-standard way.
For my app, it does not matter. I simply added a 270 degree auto-rotate (using Taifun's extension) in the blocks after taking the photo. My app will only run on a dedicated LG phone, so this "hard" way of fixing the problem is OK for me.
But I think this is still a big problem for others who plan to widely distribute their app and have it run smoothly of many different brands of smartphones.
Several people in this forum have suggested adding a rotation button to these apps to solve this problem. While helpful, that is not a very elegant solution in my view; it leaves the burden on the user to manually rotate a photo image whereas the user would rightly expect this to be handled automatically by the app.
Just my two cents.
Zimbu