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Rotate Image

Rotate Image

Rotate images by 90°, 180°, or 270°, and flip them horizontally or vertically to correct orientation. It's the quick fix for sideways phone photos, mirrored selfies, and upside-down scans — and it works entirely in your browser.

Processed in your browser. This tool runs entirely on your device. Your image is never uploaded to us.

Overview

Rotation in 90° steps is lossless when you export to PNG, so you can straighten an image without re-compressing it. Preview the new orientation live and download the corrected file in a single click.

What this tool does

The rotate tool turns your image in 90-degree increments and mirrors it horizontally or vertically. It redraws the image at the new orientation on a canvas and exports a corrected file, so a sideways or mirrored photo comes out properly aligned.

Problems it solves

  • A phone photo imported sideways or upside down.
  • A selfie or scan is mirrored and text reads backward.
  • A document scan needs a 90° or 180° turn to be readable.
  • An image needs flipping to match a layout or design direction.

Key benefits

  • Rotate in 90° steps or flip instantly
  • Live preview of the new orientation
  • Lossless for PNG output
  • One-click download

Who it's for

Phone photographers fixing orientationPeople digitizing and straightening scansDesigners mirroring images for layoutsAnyone correcting a rotated or flipped picture

How to use it

  1. 1

    Upload your image

    Drop a JPG, PNG, or WEBP into the tool. The current orientation appears in the live preview.

  2. 2

    Rotate or flip

    Use the left/right buttons to rotate in 90° steps, and the flip buttons to mirror horizontally or vertically.

  3. 3

    Check the preview

    Watch the preview update so you can confirm the orientation is exactly right before exporting.

  4. 4

    Apply and download

    Choose your output format and download the corrected image with a single click.

Example input and output

A landscape illustration of two buildings against a gradient sky, upright and correctly oriented.
Original — 1600 × 1000
The same illustration rotated 90 degrees clockwise, so the sky runs down the left side and the frame is now taller than it is wide.
Rotated 90° — 1000 × 1600, axes swapped

Example input

A 1600 × 1000 landscape image that needs to become a portrait crop.

Example output

The same image turned 90° clockwise, now 1000 × 1600.

A quarter turn swaps width and height — 1600 × 1000 becomes 1000 × 1600. Nothing is cropped and nothing is resampled, so exporting to PNG or lossless WEBP gives a result pixel-identical to the source.

What each rotation does

The same landscape frame shown at 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees clockwise, with the resulting pixel dimensions under each — 90 and 270 degrees swap width and height.
Quarter turns swap width and height; half turns leave the dimensions alone. Nothing is cropped at any angle.

Rotation reference

What each option does to the frame, and when you want it.

Rotation and flip options, their effect on dimensions, and when to use each
ActionEffect on dimensionsUse it when
90° clockwiseWidth and height swapA portrait photo is lying on its right side
90° counter-clockwiseWidth and height swapA portrait photo is lying on its left side
180°UnchangedA scan or photo came out completely upside down
Flip horizontalUnchangedMirroring a selfie, or correcting a mirrored scan
Flip verticalUnchangedCorrecting a scan fed into the scanner the wrong way up

A photo that looks upright on your phone but sideways everywhere else is usually storing its orientation as an EXIF tag rather than in the pixels. Rotating here writes the correction into the pixels themselves, so it holds everywhere.

Common use cases

Fix sideways phone photos

Straighten images that imported in the wrong orientation because of how the phone was held.

Un-mirror selfies and scans

Flip horizontally so text and faces appear the correct way around instead of reversed.

Straighten document scans

Rotate scanned pages 90° or 180° so they're readable and ready to share or archive.

Match a design direction

Mirror an image vertically or horizontally to fit the flow of a layout or composition.

Tips & best practices

  • Export as PNG to stay lossless

    Rotating in 90° steps doesn't degrade pixels, but re-saving as JPG does. Choose PNG output when you want to straighten an image without any re-compression.

  • Use flip to fix mirrored text

    If text in a selfie or scan reads backward, a horizontal flip corrects it. Rotation alone won't un-mirror an image — that's what flipping is for.

  • Combine rotate and flip when needed

    Some orientations need both a turn and a mirror. Apply a rotation and a flip together to get scanned documents and photos perfectly aligned.

Rotate Image — frequently asked questions

Yes. You can rotate in 90 degree steps clockwise or counter-clockwise, and flip horizontally or vertically. Flipping is what you want for mirroring a selfie or correcting a scan fed in the wrong way up; rotating is for a photo that is lying on its side. Neither operation crops anything.

No, when you rotate in 90 degree steps. Quarter turns remap whole pixels to new positions with no interpolation, so nothing is resampled. The only loss comes from the export: choose PNG or lossless WEBP and the result is pixel-identical to the source. Exporting to JPG adds one ordinary lossy encode.

No. The rotation is applied on a canvas inside the page, to a file read from your own device, and re-encoded locally. Nothing is transmitted. As with every browser-based tool here, you can confirm it in your browser's Network tab — no request carries the image.

Not currently — rotation is limited to 90 degree steps plus horizontal and vertical flips. Arbitrary angles need either a larger canvas to fit the rotated corners or a crop that loses part of the frame, and both involve resampling every pixel. Quarter turns avoid all of that, which is why they stay lossless.

Because your phone stored the rotation as an EXIF orientation tag rather than actually rotating the pixels. Your camera roll honours that tag; many upload pipelines ignore it, so the image reverts to how the pixels are really arranged. Rotating here writes the correction into the pixels themselves, so it holds everywhere.

Rotating turns the image around its centre, so a 90 degree turn swaps width and height. Flipping mirrors it across an axis and leaves the dimensions unchanged. Text gives it away: rotated text is still readable if you tilt your head, flipped text reads backwards.

Only if you choose to change it. The output format is yours to set, so you can keep the original or convert while you rotate. Converting in the same pass is worth doing when you were going to convert anyway, since it avoids putting a lossy file through a second encode.

Yes. The rotate tool is fully responsive and runs in any modern mobile browser, with the same 90 degree steps and flips available on a phone as on a desktop. Since the processing happens on your device, it also works offline once the page has loaded.

It makes the tag irrelevant rather than merely editing it. Rotating bakes the correct orientation into the pixels themselves, so the image displays the same way in every viewer regardless of whether that viewer reads EXIF. Re-encoding through a canvas also drops the metadata, orientation tag included.

Sources and further reading

The claims on this page about formats, browser behaviour, and performance come from these primary sources rather than from us.

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Last reviewed and updated . Written and maintained by the Appzo Tools team.