We used cropping only to makes sure another application reads the image file and writes it back to storage. I did that all under Windows with GIMP, Picasa and DigiKam. Possibly, if you do that on the same smartphone, the function saving it, makes the same mistake as the camera app.
If you have access to a PC with Windows, the solution my approach with ExifTool by Phil Harvey is much faster and does it within seconds.
Only now that I saw, you were successful with Irfanview @Yesingen. I didn’t think about that one, when I tried multiple editors.