Rotate or flip an image

How to use it#

1. Drop an image into the Result area, or click it to choose a file.
2. Press rotate left or rotate right to turn it a quarter at a time.
3. Tick flip horizontally or vertically to mirror what you see.
4. Download the result. The format matches what you put in.

Why a photo arrives on its side#

A phone camera does not turn the picture when you turn the phone. It stores the pixels the way the sensor read them and writes a small orientation tag alongside them saying which way up the result should be shown. Photo apps read that tag, which is why the picture looks right on the phone.

Plenty of software does not read it. Upload the same file to a form, drop it into a document, or open it with a tool that ignores metadata, and it appears rotated a quarter turn. Turning the image here rewrites the actual pixels, so the picture is upright in anything that opens it, tag or no tag.

Turning is lossless, saving might not be#

Rotating by a quarter, a half, or three quarters moves every pixel to a new position without inventing or discarding any. Nothing is interpolated, because each pixel lands exactly on another pixel. The same is true of both mirrors.

What can cost you quality is the saving. A JPEG has to be decoded and re-encoded, and JPEG encoding is lossy, so a turned JPEG is very slightly softer than the original even though the turn itself was exact. PNG and WebP are written losslessly here, so those come back identical apart from their new orientation.

If that matters for a large photo library, a tool that rewrites the orientation tag rather than the pixels avoids the re-encode. For a single image about to be printed or uploaded, the difference is not visible.

What flip does that rotate cannot#

Rotating moves the picture around a point. Flipping reflects it, which swaps left and right, or top and bottom, and no amount of turning reproduces that. Text in a flipped photo reads backwards, and that is the giveaway: if the writing in your image looks wrong after a flip, you wanted a rotation.

Flipping both ways at once is the same as a half turn, which is a useful thing to know when you are two clicks in and something looks off. The mirror applies to what is currently on screen, so after a quarter turn, flip horizontally still mirrors the image left to right as you are looking at it.

The usual reason to flip is a selfie. Front cameras often save the preview you saw rather than the scene, so a shirt logo comes out mirrored. Flipping horizontally puts it back.

What comes out#

A JPEG comes back as a JPEG, a WebP as a WebP, and anything else as a PNG, including GIF and AVIF sources. Browsers can decode more image formats than they can write, so PNG is the lossless target for the ones they cannot save back. Safari cannot write WebP, so there a WebP comes back as a PNG, and the page says so. An animated GIF comes back as a still of its first frame.

Transparency survives into PNG and WebP. A JPEG cannot store it, so a transparent area is filled with white on the way out rather than coming back black, which is what an unfilled canvas would give you.