I’ve upgraded to a surface pro 7 from a Pro 4. On the old setup I never had to think about image rotation. On the new machine only landscape images behave. Placing a Portrait orientation image causes problems. On the screen I can rotate, crop and scale the image how I expect it to look; and it displays fine. Once exported to a PDF or image the portrait images have all rotated 90 degrees from the bottom left corner. This is only happening on the new computer. I’ve opened the test file on my old computer and it works fine. All settings in layout that I can find are identical between the machines.
The PDF is what comes out of my machine, the red bounding boxes are overlays of where the image was. In the case of the box being blank on the screen shot, but filled in the PDF, the box is a clipping mask for an image that hasn’t flipped yet.
This sounds like a issue I have experienced the past. It has to do with Layout not reading the images EXIF Metadata correctly. A work around is to change the images orientation. I believe GIMP will “ask” you if you want to rotate it when you first open an image that has been taken when in landscape mode. Click accept. Then save it (or a new copy if you want to keep original orientation).