Rotate and Flip Image

How rotating and flipping works

The tool opens each image in your browser and draws it again on a canvas, turned or mirrored the way you set it, then saves the result as a new file. Your original stays untouched. Because the work happens on your own device, it is quick even for a stack of large phone photos, and nothing is uploaded anywhere.

• Left 90° and Right 90°: turn the picture a quarter turn counterclockwise or clockwise. Width and height swap, so a landscape photo becomes portrait.
• 180°: turns the picture upside down. Width and height stay the same.
• Flip horizontal: mirrors the image left to right, like the reflection in a mirror. Use it to undo a mirrored selfie or to face a product photo the other way.
• Flip vertical: mirrors the image top to bottom, like a reflection in water.
• Any angle: turns the image by a free number of degrees, for example 1.5 to level a crooked horizon.

Flips always work on the picture as you see it in the preview. If you have turned a photo by 90 degrees and then press Flip horizontal, the left and right of what is on your screen swap, not the left and right of the original file. The order of your clicks therefore matches what you see, and the file list sums up the result in plain words, like "turned 90° right, mirrored horizontally".

Rotate, flip or mirror?

These words get mixed up a lot, so here is the difference in short. Rotating turns the picture around its center and never reverses it: text in a rotated photo still reads normally once you tilt your head. Flipping, also called mirroring, reverses the picture along a line: text in a flipped image reads backwards.

Two flips cancel each other out, and flipping both horizontally and vertically gives exactly the same picture as a 180 degree turn. Four quarter turns bring you back to the start. If you lose track, press Reset and begin again.

Straightening by any angle

A picture turned by an angle that is not a multiple of 90 degrees no longer fills a rectangle, so its corners stick out. The tool gives you two ways to deal with that:

• Expand canvas: the new image is just large enough to hold the whole turned picture. The empty triangles in the corners are transparent, white, black or a color you pick. This suits logos, stickers and design elements, or a picture you want to place on a colored page.
• Crop to fit: the tool cuts out the largest rectangle with the shape of the original that has no empty corners. The photo stays a clean rectangle, a little smaller than before. This is the usual choice for straightening a crooked horizon or a scanned page.

Small angles are typical for straightening: most crooked photos are off by one to five degrees. Use the slider to get close, then type an exact value such as 2.3 in the box. Positive numbers turn clockwise and negative numbers turn counterclockwise. Turning by a free angle has to compute every pixel anew from its neighbors, so very fine detail gets a little softer. Quarter turns and flips do not have this problem, because every pixel simply moves to a new place.

Only PNG and WebP can store transparent corners. JPG has no transparency, so transparent corners in a JPG file turn white. Pick PNG or WebP under Save as if you need them see-through.

Why phone photos sometimes show up sideways

Many cameras and phones store the pixels in the direction the sensor reads them and add an Orientation tag to the EXIF data that says how to turn the picture for display. Browsers follow that tag by default; MDN documents this as the default value of the CSS image-orientation property. A program that does not apply the tag shows the photo on its side.

This tool opens every photo upright according to its tag, as your browser shows it, so the preview matches what you saw in your gallery. The copy you save has the turn built into its pixels and carries no EXIF data, so it no longer depends on any tag and looks the same in every app. The camera details, date and location from the original are not copied either. To look at that metadata first, or to remove it without rotating, use the EXIF viewer and remover.

Formats and quality

With Save as set to Original, each file keeps its format: a JPG stays a JPG, a PNG stays a PNG and a WebP stays a WebP. GIF and BMP files are saved as PNG, and HEIC photos from an iPhone and AVIF files are saved as JPG. Animated GIFs lose their animation: browsers hand the tool a single still frame, which the HTML standard defines as the default image of the animation, or the first frame. You can also convert everything to one format in the same step.

PNG is lossless, so the pixels are saved exactly. JPG and WebP are compressed, and the quality slider decides how much: higher means better quality and larger files. The default of 92 is hard to tell apart from the original for most photos. Each time a JPG or WebP file is saved, it is compressed again, so for repeated edits it helps to keep a high quality or work in PNG until the last step. To make files smaller afterwards, the image compressor helps, and the image cropper can trim a rotated photo to an exact shape.

How to use the rotate and flip tool

1. 1Drop one or more images on the box, choose them from your device, or paste an image. Phone photos open upright.
2. 2Press Left 90°, Right 90°, 180°, Flip horizontal or Flip vertical, or set any angle. With several images, switch off Apply to all images to fix one at a time.
3. 3Pick the corners, background and format, check the preview, and download one image or all of them as a ZIP.

Frequently asked questions