Glad to have saved you the tickets. The part that bites later: browsers honour the Orientation tag by themselves, so a wrongly rotated file looks fine in Chrome and comes out sideways in every tool that reads raw pixels — and once the tag is stripped there is nothing left to correct from. If your pipeline re-encodes anyway, baking the rotation into the pixels first and writing Orientation=1 afterwards costs one extra pass and removes that whole class of bug. Unrelated, but the bit about story views retrying after a relay hiccup is the right instinct: most clients just drop the event and pretend it never happened.