i was able to set the hmirror to False in the library itself to get a non-mirrored live view and stored photo by changing it to self.camera.hmirror = False so maybe this could be a choice in the constructor when we create the pycam object in code?

I ran into same thing running the camera example.

It's possible to fix in user code with:

pycam.camera.hmirror = False

hmirror is a property of the camera object within the pycam instance, not pycam itself.

I just added it after the constructor like this:

pycam = adafruit_pycamera.PyCamera()
pycam.camera.hmirror = False

Maybe pycam.camera.hmirror = False should be the default?

Yep. Agree. But don't know reasoning behind current default in library.