Rotate & Flip
Rotate or mirror images in the browser. Batch-apply the same transform to many files at once.
How to rotate or flip images
- Drop your JPG, PNG, or WebP files into the upload box, or click to select.
- Pick a rotation (0°, 90°, 180°, or 270°).
- Optionally add horizontal or vertical flip.
- Click Apply transform.
- Download the transformed images individually or as a batch.
The same transform applies to every file in the batch. Everything runs in your browser; files never get uploaded.
When to rotate
Cameras and phones record orientation metadata, and most modern image viewers display photos upright regardless of how the camera was held. But sometimes that metadata is wrong, missing, or stripped, and the image needs to be physically rotated. Common triggers:
- Photos taken on a phone that saved orientation metadata which some downstream tool ignores.
- Scans that came out sideways or upside-down.
- Screenshots that need to fit a different aspect ratio.
- Images from a camera where the orientation sensor failed.
The tool applies physical rotation to the pixel data. The output image is oriented the way it looks in your preview, regardless of any metadata.
When to flip
Horizontal flip (mirror across the vertical axis) is useful for:
- Correcting selfie-camera mirroring for group photos.
- Creating design variants (left-facing and right-facing versions of a character illustration, for example).
- Matching a layout where the image needs to face the other direction.
Vertical flip is rarer but occasionally needed:
- Correcting images scanned upside-down.
- Converting a mirror-reflection shot (e.g., a photo of a ceiling mirror).
You can combine rotate and flip in one operation. A 90° rotate with horizontal flip is often the right answer for scanner output that’s both rotated and mirrored.
Output format
The tool preserves the input format. A JPG stays JPG, a PNG stays PNG, a WebP stays WebP. Quality settings:
- JPG and WebP output uses quality 92 — near-lossless and rarely shows artifacts.
- PNG output is lossless.
If you need a different output format or lower quality for size, run the transformed file through our JPG compressor or PNG-to-WebP converter as a second step.
Lossless rotate vs re-encode
There’s a subtle technical note for JPG users. Pure 90°/180°/270° rotations can be done “losslessly” on JPG files using tools like jpegtran that operate on the compressed block structure directly. Our tool doesn’t do this — it decodes and re-encodes via canvas, which introduces one round of JPG’s lossy compression.
For most use cases the quality loss is imperceptible (we encode at quality 92). If you need bit-perfect lossless JPG rotation, use jpegtran -rot90 input.jpg > output.jpg or a similar desktop tool.
Transparent backgrounds
PNG and WebP images with transparency preserve their alpha channel through rotation and flipping. The transparent regions remain transparent.
JPG doesn’t support transparency, so any JPG input is already opaque to begin with.
Metadata
Canvas re-encoding strips EXIF, GPS, and other metadata. This is usually what you want for privacy, but note that the orientation EXIF tag is also dropped — which is fine because the physical orientation is now correct.
For explicit metadata stripping without transformation, see our EXIF stripper.
Common mistakes
- Rotating an image that was already auto-rotated by the viewer, producing a sideways result.
- Forgetting to click Apply transform after changing settings. The tool only processes on demand.
- Expecting the transform to be lossless on JPG. It re-encodes, so there’s a minimal quality hit.
- Trying to rotate by arbitrary angles (e.g. 15°). The tool supports 90° increments only. For arbitrary angles, you’d need a full editor.