Hi, sorry for the crossposting but this started to look more a suggestion than a bug now…
The problem: a document, or image, or photo, has always to be rotated to be viewed in the correct way. Furthermore, when rotating an image, Devonthink is acting like opening the file, start some kind of editing mode, saving the file in TIF format (even if the file was in another format i.e. JPG).
My suggestion would be that Devonthink when including images in the database flag them with a logical orientation status of “0”, and then, if a user rotates it 90° right, it just update that flag to “90”. If the user rotates it again the flag status becomes “180”, if rotates again it becomes “270”. Instead, if the images is rotated 90° left from the original orientation the flag becomes “270”, then “180”, then “90”… and so on.
This way there is no need for Devonthink to save orientation changes and make changes to the original file (i.e. non destructive orientation change, or editing, à la Lightroom database). DT can retrieve the original file from the database, look at the orientation flag and rotate it in memory before displaying it.
I hope I have been clear, if not I am available for further explanation of the suggestion…