In the latest 8.6 build, I'm finding that the SCALE_IMAGE function strips EXIF info.
I'm making a 2nd image - my own thumbnail - but since the original image was rotated 90deg (was a portrait image), since the EXIF is stripped by Aware, the thumbnail displays sideways (because it doesn't contain the industry standard info that says it needs to be rotated to display correctly).
EXIF viewer here: http://exif.regex.info/exif.cgi
the 1st image is all the info available from my thumbnail, which was created by SCALE_IMAGE:

And these 2 images are from the source file _ all this is thrown away:

