We definitely have a precedent of storing metadata in the form most useful for us, rather than in the "native" form, although I think this might be one of the first places where we want to write the metadata back into the file. Still, as long as there's a bijection between the raw EXIF and what we store, it shouldn't be an issue.

In general, it's perfectly fine to transform the metadata into whatever form we find most useful in the app, since we might end up supporting image formats that store their orientation in a different (read: not EXIF) way. By storing the orientation in our own format, we abstract away the specific format used by the files. That's not to imply that we *can't* store the orientation in the same way as EXIF.