What this rotate & flip tool does
It fixes the two oldest annoyances in digital photography: the picture that comes out sideways, and the picture that comes out backwards. Load any image and you can rotate it a quarter-turn at a time — left (counter-clockwise) or right (clockwise) — and flip it horizontally, which mirrors it left-to-right like a reflection, or vertically, which turns it upside down. Every click updates the preview instantly and reports the picture's current dimensions and orientation, and you can combine operations freely: rotate twice and flip once, flip both ways, whatever the picture needs. When it looks right, one click downloads the corrected image as a PNG.
A detail that matters more than you'd expect: when a portrait photo is rotated to landscape, its width and height must swap places — a 3000 × 4000 picture becomes 4000 × 3000. Tools that forget this (an earlier version of this very tool, inherited from a plugin, had exactly that bug) draw the rotated picture squashed into the old frame, with its edges sliced off. Here the canvas is rebuilt to the correct new dimensions on every quarter-turn, so what you see in the preview is pixel-for-pixel what lands in your download.
How to rotate or flip an image
- Choose the image. It appears in the box.
- Rotate Left or Rotate Right until the picture stands upright. Each click is a quarter-turn; four clicks either way bring you back to the start.
- Flip Horizontal to mirror the picture (the fix for front-camera selfies where text reads backwards), or Flip Vertical to turn it top-to-bottom.
- Download the corrected image. Your original file is never changed.
Rotate or flip — which one do I actually need?
The two get confused constantly, and the picture itself tells you which is wrong. If the scene is upright but tilted onto its side — heads pointing at the wall, the horizon running vertically — that's rotation. If the scene is upright and level but reversed — writing reads backwards, a parting in someone's hair is on the wrong side, a familiar street looks subtly unfamiliar — that's a mirror image, and Flip Horizontal is the cure. Front phone cameras cause the second problem: many save the mirrored preview you saw while posing rather than the true scene. Flipping cannot make a sideways photo upright, and rotating cannot un-mirror one, so diagnose first, then click. Note that flipping a photo with visible text makes the text read backwards — if you flip a picture to fix a face, check for signs, shirts and book covers in the background and decide which wrong bothers you less.
Frequently asked questions
Why do my phone photos open sideways in some programs?
Phones record an orientation note (EXIF) instead of rotating the actual pixels. Most modern software honors it, but some ignores it and shows the raw pixels — sideways. Rotating the picture here bakes the correction into the pixels themselves, so it displays correctly everywhere.
What's the difference between flip horizontal and rotate 180°?
Flip horizontal mirrors the image left-to-right: the scene is reversed, like a reflection. Rotate 180° turns it upside down: the scene is not mirrored, just inverted. They produce visibly different results on anything with text or a recognizable layout.
Does rotating reduce quality?
Quarter-turn rotations are exact — pixels are rearranged, not resampled — and the result here is saved as lossless PNG, so no quality is lost at all.
Can I rotate by a few degrees to straighten a crooked photo?
This tool does exact 90° steps, which is what orientation problems need. Straightening a slightly crooked horizon needs a few-degrees rotation with edge fill — a different tool that we may add; cropping slightly after a straighten is the classic workflow.
Private by design: rotation and flipping are done by your browser's canvas on your own device. Your picture is never uploaded anywhere.