How to rotate or flip an image
- Add your image. Drag it onto the box, click to browse, or paste a copied image file straight from the clipboard.
- Turn it. Rotate left 90° and Rotate right 90° spin the picture a quarter turn at a time. Flip horizontal mirrors left and right, Flip vertical mirrors top and bottom.
- Straighten it. Drag the slider between -45° and +45° in half-degree steps to level a crooked horizon.
- Download. The file saves as yourname-edited, and Reset puts everything back to the original orientation without reloading the picture.
The four settings are held as separate values rather than stacked one on top of the last, so the order you click in makes no difference to the result. Each redraw starts again from the image you opened. Rotate right eight times and the final version is exactly as sharp as the first.
Why so many phone photos arrive sideways
Blame one number. Cameras usually do not turn the pixels when you hold the handset upright, because it is cheaper to store the picture the way the sensor saw it and then write a single tag into the file saying which way up it was meant to go, and that tag is called Orientation. Value 1 means the file is already correct. Value 6 means turn it 90° clockwise, 8 means 270°, 3 means 180°. The other four values, 2, 4, 5 and 7, cover mirrored versions of those, and they mostly come from front-facing cameras and flatbed scanners. You will find it as tag 274, hex 112, in the Exif spec from CIPA and JEITA, currentlyCIPA DC-X008 (Exif 2.32).
So the same file can look right in one app and wrong in the next. Software that reads the tag shows your photo upright. Software that ignores it shows it lying on its side. Older upload forms, some print shops and a fair few email clients still ignore it.
This tool reads the tag while it decodes, so the preview is already corrected. Your clicks sit on top. The picture you download has the orientation baked into the pixels, not left as a flag for the next program to honour or skip.
What the straighten slider quietly removes
Tilt a rectangle and its corners poke out past the frame, leaving blank wedges. The slider crops those away for you, down to the largest upright rectangle that still holds nothing but picture. That costs pixels. More of them than most people expect, in fact. Take a 4000 x 3000 photo:
- 1° leaves 3949 x 2931, about 96% of the pixel count.
- 3° leaves 3858 x 2801, about 90%.
- 5° leaves 3780 x 2680, about 84%.
- 45° on a square image throws away exactly half the area.
So nudge the slider gently. And straighten before you crop, not after.
The honest version of "lossless rotation"
Some photo apps promise lossless JPEG rotation. They use a different trick: shuffling the compressed blocks inside the file without ever decoding it. No quality is lost, which is lovely, but the JPEG format sets a limit. Those blocks are minimum coded units of 8 or 16 pixels, and the shuffle can only move whole ones.
The jpegtran manualis blunt about it. The transform works "rather oddly if the image dimensions are not a multiple of the iMCU size", so a stray strip is left untouched along the right or bottom edge. Add the -trim switch and you lose those edge pixels instead.
A 4032 x 3024 iPhone frame divides by 16 cleanly. Plenty of cropped images and screenshots do not.
This tool takes the simpler route. It decodes the picture, applies your changes, and writes a fresh file. A PNG round trip changes nothing at all. A JPEG is re-encoded once at quality 0.92, which is high enough that you will struggle to spot it, but it is still a re-encode.
What comes out the other end
- JPEG in, JPG out. Quality 0.92, and any transparent area is filled white because JPEG carries no alpha channel.
- PNG, WebP, BMP or GIF in, PNG out. Lossless, with transparency kept intact.
- Animated GIFs lose the animation. Only the first frame is decoded, and it saves as a still PNG.
- Metadata does not carry across. The saved file is built from the on-screen pixels, so the original Exif block, including camera model and any GPS coordinates, is not part of it.
Need a different format or a smaller file afterwards? Send it through the image converteror the image compressor. To trim edges rather than turn the whole frame, use thecrop tool.
Frequently asked questions
Which file formats can I open?
Anything your browser can decode, which in practice means JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP and usually AVIF. Files that are not images are refused with a message rather than a broken preview.
Will rotating change the quality or the file size?
A quarter turn moves pixels around without inventing any, so nothing is lost in the maths itself. The re-encode is where any change happens. PNG output is lossless. JPEG output is written at quality 0.92, and the saved size can land above or below the original depending on how heavily your camera or phone compressed it in the first place.
Can I rotate by a custom angle instead of 90° steps?
Yes. The straighten slider covers -45° to +45° in half-degree steps and stacks on top of the quarter-turn buttons, so a 90° click plus a 4° nudge gives you 94°. Blank corners are cropped away automatically.
Does the tool keep my photo's Exif data?
No. The exported picture is generated from the canvas pixels, so the original metadata block does not travel with it. Camera make and model, capture date, lens details and GPS coordinates are all absent from the file you download.
What happens to an animated GIF?
You get the first frame only, saved as a PNG. Rotating every frame of an animation needs a dedicated GIF editor.
Why does my straightened photo have fewer pixels than the original?
Because the tool crops the blank wedges that any tilt creates. The steeper the angle, the bigger the crop: 1° costs about 4% of the pixel count on a 4:3 photo, 5° costs about 16%.