f-spot fails to import portrait-oriented photos downloaded by gthumb

Binary package hint: f-spot

I just discovered that a great many photos were missing from my f-spot photo collection today. The default photo download program in Ubuntu is gthumb, which launches whenever I plug in my Canon A520 camera. gthumb properly rotates portrait mode photos (as marked by the camera's orentation sensor) so they appear correctly oriented in nautilus.

When I attempt to import these photos into f-spot, f-spot dumps a message to the console, but otherwise silently fails to import the picture. I've lost a number of pictures this way, because once the pictures are "safely" in f-spot, I delete the folder that gthumb created.

Here's what f-spot dumps when importing one of these pictures:
burner@phoenix:~/.gconf/apps$ f-spot
Starting new FSpot server
item ImportCommand+SourceItem
Scanning /home/burner/Desktop/Alaska Trip Part 2
loading exif data
loading exif data
loading exif data
loading exif data
loading exif data
Error importing /home/burner/Desktop/Alaska Trip Part 2/img_4687.jpg
System.ArgumentNullException: Argument cannot be null.
Parameter name: src
in <0x00000> <unknown method>
in (wrapper managed-to-native) System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal:copy_from_unmanaged (intptr,int,System.Array,int)
in <0x00013> System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal:Copy (IntPtr source, System.Byte[] destination, Int32 startIndex, Int32 length)
in <0x00050> Exif.ExifEntry:get_Data ()
in <0x00054> FSpot.JpegFile:get_Description ()
in <0x0006d> PhotoStore:Create (System.String newPath, System.String origPath, Gdk.Pixbuf thumbnail)
in <0x000d5> FileImportBackend:Step (.Photo photo, Gdk.Pixbuf thumbnail, System.Int32 count)
Could not import file
loading exif data
loading exif data
loading exif data
loading exif data
cleanup context
cleanup context
Stopping