Chrome Image EXIF Orientation Issue

The reason for this behavior is that Chrome auto-rotates pictures based on EXIF data only if they are displayed directly in a browser tab as the main document.

The relevant chromium issue that tracked this implementation is the following: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=56845

In the future, Chrome (and other browsers) will allow developers to enable auto-rotation also for images displayed via img tags with the CSS image-rotation property: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=158753

Update: as of Chrome 81 (moved to stable on 5/13/20), this behavior is supported in both img tags and backround-image tags. https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6313474512650240