Photos often arrive sideways — phones record the orientation as metadata rather than rotating the actual pixels, and software that ignores that metadata displays them rotated. Rotating here bakes the correct orientation into the pixels themselves, so the image looks right everywhere.
How to use the Image Rotator & Flip
- Upload your image
- Use the rotate buttons for 90°, 180° or 270°
- Use the flip buttons to mirror horizontally or vertically
- Choose an output format and download
Rotation versus flipping
Rotation turns the image around its centre. 90° and 270° swap the width and height; 180° keeps the dimensions and turns the image upside down.
Flipping mirrors the image across an axis. A horizontal flip reverses left and right — useful for selfies, which many phone cameras mirror. A vertical flip reverses top and bottom, which is rarer and mostly used for reflections.
Note that flipping is not the same as rotating 180°: a 180° rotation mirrors both axes at once.
Why your photo appears sideways
JPEG files carry an EXIF Orientation tag telling viewers how the camera was held. Modern browsers and photo apps honour it; a lot of older software, and many upload pipelines, do not. The result is an image that looks correct on your phone and sideways on a website.
Rotating the image here rewrites the actual pixel data, so the orientation no longer depends on any software reading the metadata correctly.
Frequently asked questions
Does rotating lose image quality?
The rotation itself is lossless — 90° increments just move pixels around. Quality is only affected by the format you export to. Export as PNG to avoid any loss at all, or JPEG at high quality if file size matters.
Why does my photo look correct on my phone but sideways on my site?
Your phone is reading the EXIF Orientation tag and rotating for display. The website is not. Rotating the image here writes the correct orientation into the pixels, which fixes it everywhere.
Can I rotate by an arbitrary angle, like 5°?
Not with this tool — it handles 90° increments only. Arbitrary rotation requires interpolating new pixel values and leaves empty corners that have to be cropped or filled, which needs a full image editor.