I'm having issues with the orientation of HEIC images. These were copied over to my desktop computer from my iPhone.

I suspect this has something to do with the EXIF (Exiv2) vs ExifTool. On all my files the EXIF tab is blank, however the ExifTool tab has the correct values, including orientation.

It seems that digiKam isn't able to use the ExifTool metadata, just to view it in the tab?

Initially I had a problem that some of the images did seem to work, however, I discovered that those images were already modified by a different program. For those images that worked, I had done some face tagging in the IMatch program that I was evaluating.

So I am guessing that HEIC files are still (partially) unsupported?

Is there any way I could preprocess the files with ExifTool such that digiKam will at least understand the orientation tag?