Strangeness or Expected Behavior

["J. Gardner Biggs" <gardnerbiggs houston rr com>]

I just installed f-spot-0.0.9 from ubuntu/hoary.

Imported a folder with ~20 or so *.jpg images, some of which where
"sideways."  I used the rotate image function to turn an image
right-side-up.

Closed f-spot.

Opened the imported dir in nautilus-2.9.91, noticed that the image
thumbnail is still "sideways."  I figure the thumbnail needs to be
refreshed so I move all the files into another dir.  Open other dir,
nautilus renders the thumbnails and the image is still sideways. Hmm,
this is strange.  So I open the file with gqview, gthumb, and gimp.  All
show it "sideways."

Ok, so I figure f-spot doesn't really rotate the image, it just keeps a
setting somewhere that tells it to render the image as rotated.

To test my theory, I delete the dir ~/.gnome2/f-spot/

I start f-spot and notice that no images are displayed as expected.  I
import the original dir and lo and behold the image is not sideways but
right side up as I had changed it before in f-spot.  This leaves me
scratching my head.

What does f-spot actually do when rotating an image?  does it change the
image or simple make a note in some other config file I am overlooking?

Thanks.