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Rotate and Flip Image

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Drop images in to start. They are turned on your device and never uploaded.

Turn a sideways photo upright, or mirror it left to right, and save it that way for good. Every press stacks onto the last one and Undo takes it back, so you can try a turn and change your mind. Drop in a whole folder of scans and they all get the same treatment. The picture below the buttons is the actual file you are about to download, made on your own device and never uploaded.

About rotating and flipping

A photo that looks fine on your phone and sideways everywhere else is not broken. Cameras almost never turn the pixels: they write the picture the way the sensor saw it and add a small orientation tag saying which way up it should be shown. Good software reads the tag, older software ignores it, and anything that strips metadata loses it entirely. The cure is to bake the turn into the pixels themselves, which is what this page does, so the image is the right way up everywhere with no tag to trust. The EXIF viewer will show you the orientation tag your camera actually wrote, if you want to see the cause rather than just fix it.

Flipping is a different job and is worth keeping separate in your head. Rotating moves the picture around a corner and nothing about it changes; flipping mirrors it, so text reads backwards and a face looks subtly wrong to anyone who knows it. Flipping is what you want for a scan fed into the scanner the wrong way round, or for a selfie that came out mirrored, and it is what you want to avoid when the job was only ever a quarter turn. If the sideways pages are in a scanned document rather than a photo, rotate the PDF instead and the pages stay text.

However many presses you stack up, the image is drawn exactly once. The turns and the mirrors are collapsed into a single transform first, so four quarter turns really do return the original pixels rather than four rounds of resampling. A PNG or WebP comes back with no loss at all. A JPEG has to be re-encoded, because that is the only way to write one, which is what the quality slider is for.

How to rotate or flip an image

  1. Drop your images on the box, click it to browse, or paste a screenshot straight onto the page.
  2. Press Rotate left or Rotate right until it looks right. The preview is the real result, not a CSS trick.
  3. Use Flip horizontal or Flip vertical to mirror it. These work on what you see, so after a quarter turn they still do what they say.
  4. Changed your mind? Undo steps back one press at a time, and Start over clears everything.
  5. Press Download. One image saves as a file, several arrive together as a ZIP.

Common questions about rotating and flipping

Why is my photo sideways in the first place?
Because the camera stored it the way the sensor read it and recorded which way up it should be shown as an EXIF orientation tag, rather than rewriting all those pixels on the spot. Anything that reads the tag shows the photo correctly; anything that does not, including plenty of upload forms, print shops and older desktop software, shows it on its side. Saving the turn into the pixels here removes the guesswork, because there is then nothing left to interpret.

Does rotating lose quality?
The turn itself does not. A quarter turn, a half turn and a mirror all move whole pixels to whole pixels, with nothing blended or resampled, and however many presses you stack up the picture is only ever drawn once. A PNG or WebP therefore comes out pixel for pixel identical to the original, just arranged differently. A JPEG has to be compressed again on the way out, and that step is lossy, which is what the quality slider controls: leave it at 92 or above and you will not see the difference.

Is the photo sent anywhere when I rotate it?
No. The file is read, turned and saved entirely by JavaScript on this page, using your browser's own graphics engine. Nothing is sent, logged or stored. If you want proof rather than a promise, press F12, open the Network tab and rotate something: no request appears, because an upload is a request and there is not one. Switching your connection off and rotating anyway is the same check in a form that needs no interpretation.

Can I rotate several photos at once?
Yes, and that is the normal case: a folder of scans is usually sideways in the same direction. Drop them all in and every press applies to the whole set. Each one gets its own row with its new size, its own download button if you want just that one, and one press of Download saves the lot as a ZIP. They are handled one after another rather than all at once, which is slower to watch and much less likely to run a phone out of memory.

What is the difference between rotating and flipping?
Rotating spins the picture; flipping mirrors it. After a rotation the scene is unchanged and simply the other way up. After a flip it is reversed, so writing reads backwards, a parting moves to the other side of a head and a landscape is subtly wrong to anyone who knows it. If a photo just needs standing upright, rotate. Reach for flip when a page was scanned face down, or when a front camera has already mirrored a shot of something with text in it.

I turned it 90 degrees and then flipped it, and the result surprised me. Why?
Flipping before and after a quarter turn genuinely give different pictures, which is a real property of the operations rather than a bug. This page always mirrors what you can currently see: press Flip horizontal and the left and right of the preview swap over, whatever turns came before it. That is the behaviour people expect, and it is why the order of your presses matters and why Undo exists.

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Related tools

All Image tools
Crop Image Crop freehand or to a fixed ratio, right in the browser. Resize Image Resize by pixels or percent, with the aspect ratio locked. Rotate PDF Turn sideways or upside-down pages the right way up. Compress Image Cut JPG, PNG or WebP file size with a live quality preview.