[jjd-uk]

Could someone benchmark the difference between having that setting on & off on a older build of Kodi, going by the merge date that will have to be v15 or older. Having facts and figures to highlight the performance impact would help get this back in.

[popcornmix]

Milhouse nightly builds (and LibreELEC Krypton builds) for Raspberry Pi have this:
https://github.com/popcornmix/xbmc/commi...de6e21a56f

which allows EXIF decoding to be disabled.

So, you can use one of these builds to benchmark the effect the setting has.