Rotate & Flip Image

What the tool actually does to your picture

This page loads a JPG, PNG or WebP file into a canvas element and redraws it with a rotation and optional mirroring applied. The three quick buttons step the angle by 90 degrees left, 90 degrees right, or a full 180 degrees, and the slider covers every whole degree from -180 to +180 for the in-between cases, such as a horizon sitting two degrees off level. Flip horizontal and flip vertical are separate toggles, so you can mirror a picture and turn it in the same pass. Everything happens in your browser and nothing is uploaded to a server. The preview is a scaled copy capped at 640 by 520 pixels so it stays responsive while you drag, and the file you save is rendered again at the full size of the original.

Jobs this handles well

• A phone photo that looks upright in your gallery but lands sideways once you attach it to a Gmail message or a web form, because the app that saved it relied on an orientation flag.
• Flatbed scans of receipts or certificates that came out at 90 degrees because the page went in landscape.
• Mirror-image selfies from a front camera, where writing on a shirt or a whiteboard reads backwards until you flip horizontally.
• A slightly tilted shot of a building or a beach horizon, straightened with a one or two degree nudge.
• Product shots for Etsy, eBay or Facebook Marketplace listings that need to sit the same way up as the rest of the set.

The geometry, in plain language

Turning a rectangle by anything other than a multiple of 90 degrees means the result no longer fits inside the original rectangle. The code works out a new bounding box with the standard formula: new width is (w × |cos θ|) + (h × |sin θ|), and new height is (w × |sin θ|) + (h × |cos θ|). The canvas is resized to that box, the origin is moved to its centre, the rotation and any mirroring are applied there, and the image is drawn centred. That is why an exported picture grows once you leave the 90 degree grid, and why no corner ever gets clipped. Those corners are left transparent in a PNG. Because JPG has no transparency, choosing JPG paints the background white first and saves at quality 0.92.

A worked example

Take a 4000 by 3000 pixel photo and drag the slider to 10 degrees. The cosine of 10 degrees is about 0.985 and the sine is about 0.174, so the width becomes 4000 × 0.985 + 3000 × 0.174 = 4462, and the height becomes 4000 × 0.174 + 3000 × 0.985 = 3651. Export as PNG and the file arrives named rotated-4462x3651.png, with four transparent triangles in the corners. Press the 90 degree button on that same photo instead and you get rotated-3000x4000.png with no transparent margin at all.

Limits and things it will not do

Only PNG, JPG and WebP are accepted, and anything else is refused with a short message, so HEIC files from an iPhone need converting first. Output is PNG or JPG, never WebP. The slider moves in whole degrees, so a half degree correction is out of reach. There is no crop step after the turn, no auto-straighten that finds a horizon for you, and no batch mode, so a folder of photos means one file at a time. Big images can exhaust memory on older phones, because the export canvas holds four bytes per pixel and a 50 megapixel photo needs roughly 200 MB for a single buffer. Applying a fine angle twice resamples the pixels twice and softens edges, so it is better to set the angle once. Metadata is not carried across either: the saved file has no EXIF block, so camera model, date and any orientation flag are dropped.

When another tool fits better

To change dimensions rather than orientation, use Resize Image. To cut away part of the frame, Crop Image is the right place. If a file is simply too heavy for an upload limit, try Compress Image to KB, and the guide on compressing photos for online forms covers the sizes government and job portals tend to ask for. Swapping file types is handled by Image Converter, iPhone pictures by HEIC to JPG, and stripping camera metadata deliberately by EXIF Viewer and Remover. Sideways pages inside a document belong in Rotate PDF instead.

Questions people ask

Why is my rotated file larger than the original?

Any angle that is not a multiple of 90 degrees needs a bigger bounding box to hold the tilted rectangle, so the saved picture gains transparent corners and more pixels. A quarter turn or a half turn keeps the same pixel count and only swaps width and height.

Can I rotate by half a degree?

No. The slider steps in whole degrees between -180 and +180. For most straightening jobs one degree is fine, but a precise architectural correction needs a full editor.

Why does my JPG have white corners instead of clear ones?

JPG cannot store transparency, so the tool fills the canvas with white before drawing the tilted image. Choose PNG if you want the corners to stay see-through.

Can I do a whole folder of photos in one go?

No. This is a single image tool: load one file, adjust it, download it, then use Load another image for the next one.

Is my photo sent anywhere?

No. The rotation is drawn on a canvas inside the page itself, and the download is created from that canvas on your own device.