Rotate and flip images

Why a photo looks fine on your phone but sideways elsewhere

Phones don’t actually turn the pixels when you hold the camera sideways. They save the photo as the sensor saw it and add a small note, the EXIF orientation tag, saying “display this rotated 90°”. Your phone’s gallery reads the note. Some upload forms, older Windows tools, printers and content management systems ignore it, and the photo appears on its side.

Running the photo through this tool fixes that for good. The image is decoded the right way up, any rotation you add is applied to the actual pixels, and the saved copy has no orientation tag left to misread. Sometimes no extra rotation is needed at all: press Apply with the rotation at 0° and the fixed copy is already correct.

Flipping and mirroring

Horizontal flips the image left to right, like a mirror. It is the fix for front-camera selfies where text on your shirt reads backwards. Vertical flips top to bottom, which is mostly useful for reflections and design work. A flip combined with a rotation is applied in a fixed order (flip first, then rotate), so the preview always shows exactly what you will get.

Tilted photos and odd angles

This tool turns in exact quarter turns, which never loses detail or changes the image size beyond swapping width and height. To straighten a horizon that is a few degrees off, use the rotate slider in Crop image, which turns by any angle and trims the corners at the same time.

File format and quality

By default each image is saved in its original format at quality 100. JPEG photos are re-encoded, so the copy is technically not bit-for-bit identical, but at that setting differences are invisible and the file may even be slightly larger than before. Lower the quality slider if size matters, or choose another output format. HEIC photos from an iPhone come out as JPEG or another format your browser can save, since browsers can’t write HEIC.

If you choose JPEG for a PNG with a transparent background, the transparency becomes white. The tool shows a warning when that applies.

Questions