Rotate Image

How the Rotate And Flip Image works

A photo that looks fine on your phone can turn up sideways in an email, an upload form or a document. The pixels were never rotated. The camera saved them in the sensor's native landscape layout and added an EXIF Orientation tag saying "turn this 90° before showing it". Phones and most browsers obey the tag, but plenty of older software, some print services and many content systems ignore it, and the picture lies on its side.

How the rotate image tool works

Your browser decodes the file and applies any Orientation tag first, so the preview shows the photo the way your phone does. The tool then draws it onto a canvas through a rotation or mirror transform and encodes the result. For the two 90° options the canvas swaps width and height, so a 4032 × 3024 landscape photo becomes 3024 × 4032 portrait.

The new file has the turn built into its pixels and carries no Orientation tag, so every program shows it the same way. Turns in 90° steps move pixels exactly; nothing is blurred, cropped or resampled.

Which option to choose

If the preview already shows the photo upright but another app shows it sideways, the file only needs its Orientation tag applied. Choose any option and run it twice to get back to the start angle, or rotate once and back again; the saved file will be upright everywhere because the tag is gone.

Rotating versus flipping

Rotation turns the whole picture around its centre. Nothing is mirrored, so text stays readable. A flip is a mirror image: left becomes right, or top becomes bottom.

Front-facing phone cameras often save a mirrored picture, because the preview behaves like a mirror while you frame the shot. Signs, T-shirt slogans and book titles then read backwards. Flip horizontally undoes that. A vertical flip on its own is rarely what anyone wants; an upside-down photo almost always needs 180° instead, which keeps text readable.

File format and quality

The output keeps the source format where the browser can write it:

PNG output is pixel-perfect. JPG and WebP are re-encoded, which costs a tiny amount of quality at 92 and usually leaves the file close to its original size. Dedicated lossless JPEG rotation exists, but it needs the width and height to be multiples of 8 or 16 and is not available in a browser. For a photo you will share or print, the difference is invisible.

Transparency is preserved for PNG and WebP. Animated GIFs come out as a single still frame.

Tips and pitfalls

Metadata is dropped. The output does not carry the camera's EXIF data: no GPS position, date taken or camera model. That is useful before posting a photo publicly. If you need the date preserved, keep the original as well.

Rotate before you crop. If a photo is both sideways and needs trimming, fix the orientation first so the crop handles in other tools line up with what you see.

Small tilts are a different job. This tool turns in 90° steps. A horizon that is a few degrees off needs the image straightener, which rotates by any angle and crops the corners.

Batch of scans? Flatbed scans often come out rotated the same way. Fix one, note the option you chose, then repeat it for the rest.

How to read the result

The stats list the source and output size in pixels and bytes, the change applied and the output format. Check the preview, then press Download.

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