System information (version)

• OpenCV => 4.5.5
• Operating System / Platform => Ubuntu 20.04
• Compiler => g++

Detailed description

I have the following constraints when I open images:

• Handling exif orientation
• Possibly convert myself from BGRA to BGR because of Inconsistant conversion from BGRA to BGR on png image #21694

I cannot use IMREAD_UNCHANGED because it will ignore the exif orientation. So I thought IMREAD_ANYCOLOR was exactly what I wanted, but it seem to have the same behavior than IMREAD_COLOR as it returns a BGRA image directly in BGR format.
The documentation is not so clear, but I expected it to respect the number of channel of the initial file, converting it to 8U (if not associated with IMREAD_ANYDEPTH) and applying the exif orientation.

If I wrongly interpreted IMREAD_ANYCOLOR, maybe another IMREAD flag is missing for my use case, or a way to apply the exif orientation afterward can be useful (just like PIL does).

Steps to reproduce

import cv2

img = cv2.imread(path, cv2.IMREAD_ANYCOLOR)
print(img.shape)

Issue submission checklist

• I report the issue, it's not a question
• I checked the problem with documentation, FAQ, open issues,
  forum.opencv.org, Stack Overflow, etc and have not found any solution
• I updated to the latest OpenCV version and the issue is still there
• There is reproducer code and related data files: videos, images, onnx, etc