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Image Rotator

Image Tools · Added

A photograph arrives on its side, or a scan comes out upside down, and the fix is four clicks in software you should not have to install. Load the image, turn it in quarter steps, mirror it if you need to, and download the result. Quarter turns rearrange whole pixels rather than resampling them, so nothing softens — and the preview you are looking at is the encoded file itself, not a CSS trick.

Or drop a file onto this box.

JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP or AVIF, up to 30.00 MB. It is read and rotated on your device — nothing is uploaded.

How to use the image rotator

  1. 1Choose an image, or drop one onto the box.
  2. 2Use Left 90°, Right 90° or 180° to turn it. The current angle is shown next to the buttons, and four turns in the same direction return you exactly where you started.
  3. 3Use the flip buttons to mirror the picture left to right or top to bottom. Rotation is applied first, then the flip.
  4. 4Check the preview — it is the actual output file, so what you see is what saves.
  5. 5Press Download. The file keeps its original format, with -rotated added to the name so it cannot overwrite the original.

Examples

A photo that came out sideways

Input
A 4032 × 3024 phone photo, rotated right 90°
Result
A 3024 × 4032 image — the dimensions swap

That swap is the whole trick. A tool that keeps the original canvas size crops the two ends off instead, which is the classic bug in browser rotation tools.

A scan that fed in upside down

Input
A scanned page, rotated 180°
Result
The same page the right way up, at identical dimensions

A half turn does not swap width and height, so the file size barely changes.

Mirroring a diagram

Input
A diagram flipped left to right
Result
A mirror image — any text in it now reads backwards

Flipping is not rotation. It reverses the picture rather than turning it, which is what you want for a mirrored scan and not what you want for a sideways photo.

About the image rotator

Why the canvas has to change shape

Turning an image a quarter turn swaps its width and its height. A 4032 × 3024 landscape photo becomes a 3024 × 4032 portrait one, and every pixel finds a new home in a canvas of different proportions. This sounds obvious and it is the single thing most home-made rotation code gets wrong: the canvas keeps the original dimensions, the turned image is drawn into it, and whatever no longer fits is discarded without a word. The result is a correctly rotated picture with its two ends missing.

The second half of the same problem is where the rotation is centred. Canvas transforms apply about the origin, which starts in the top-left corner, so rotating there swings the image out of the visible area entirely and produces a blank or mostly blank file. The fix is to move the origin to the middle of the new canvas first, rotate about that, then draw the image centred on it — which is what this tool does, and why the preview is never mysteriously cropped.

A half turn is the exception: 180° leaves the dimensions alone, because the picture ends up in the same shaped box the other way up. It is the one rotation you can get away with implementing carelessly, which is probably why the careless version survives so long before anyone notices.

Rotation, flipping, and the difference that matters

Turning and mirroring feel like neighbours and are not the same operation. A rotation preserves the arrangement of the picture and changes its direction; a flip reverses it. On a photograph of a face the difference is subtle enough to be unsettling, and on anything containing text it is immediately obvious, because mirrored writing is unreadable.

This matters because the two are often confused when describing a problem. A photo that came out of a camera sideways needs rotating — and flipping it will never fix it, only produce a sideways mirror image. A scan made through the wrong side of a transparency needs flipping, and rotating it by 180° gives a result that looks nearly right at a glance and has all its text backwards.

Order matters too, once you use both. Rotating and then flipping does not give the same result as flipping and then rotating, in the same way that putting on socks and shoes is not commutative. This tool fixes the order — rotation first, then flip — states it under the controls, and shows the actual encoded output as the preview, so there is never a question of whether what you are looking at is what will save.

Frequently asked questions

Does rotating an image reduce its quality?
The rotation itself does not. Quarter turns map every pixel onto exactly one other pixel, so the image is rearranged rather than recalculated and no detail is lost or invented. The re-encoding on the way out is the part to think about: a JPEG passes through its encoder once more, which costs a little, while a PNG is lossless and costs nothing. The tool encodes JPEGs at a high quality setting to keep that loss as small as it can.
Why can I only rotate by 90 degrees?
Because a free angle cannot be done without making the picture worse, and hiding that would be dishonest. Rotating by, say, 7° has to interpolate between neighbouring pixels, which softens fine detail and text, and it leaves empty triangles at the corners that must be filled with a colour the photograph does not contain. Straightening a crooked horizon genuinely needs that, along with a crop to remove the corners, and that belongs in an editor rather than in a tool this size.
My photo already looks upright here but is sideways elsewhere. Why?
Because of the EXIF orientation flag. Many cameras record the picture in the sensor's native direction and attach a note saying which way up it should be displayed. Software that reads the flag shows it correctly and software that ignores it shows it sideways, which is why the same file can look right in one program and wrong in another. This tool applies the flag when it decodes, then writes out a file whose pixels are genuinely in the right orientation — which fixes the problem everywhere rather than only where the flag is honoured.
What happens to the rest of the metadata?
It is not carried across. The image is drawn to a canvas and re-encoded from those pixels, and a canvas holds nothing but pixels — so the camera model, the exposure settings, the timestamp and any GPS coordinates are all absent from the download. That is usually welcome before posting a photo publicly, and it is worth knowing about if you rely on that data. Keep the original if you do.
Are my images uploaded?
They are not. Rotation happens in the tab you are looking at: the picture is drawn to a canvas element and read back out again, and at no point does an image byte travel over the network. There is no endpoint in this page capable of receiving one. A useful way to satisfy yourself is to turn off your connection after the page has finished loading and rotate something anyway — it works, because nothing about it was ever remote. The site does run advertising, and that sets cookies; the privacy policy covers what those do.

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