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Rotate Image
Rotate a photo by 90, 180 or 270 degrees and fix its orientation.
A photo that looked fine on your phone arrives sideways on your laptop. It is one of the most common little annoyances in digital photography, and it has a slightly odd cause.
Why photos end up rotated in the first place
Your phone does not physically rotate the image when you turn the handset. It records the picture the way the sensor saw it and writes a small note in the file — the EXIF orientation tag — saying which way up it should be displayed.
Software that reads that tag shows the photo correctly. Software that ignores it shows the raw sensor data, which is sideways. Rotating the image properly bakes the correct orientation into the pixels, so it looks right everywhere regardless of what reads the metadata.
Rotating your image
- Load the photo into the tool above.
- Press rotate until it is the right way up — each press turns it 90 degrees.
- Use 180 degrees for a picture that is completely upside down.
- Check the preview.
- Download the corrected image.
Where this comes in handy
- Phone photos that appear sideways when uploaded to a website or CMS.
- Scanned documents that came out of the scanner in the wrong orientation.
- Screenshots taken on a tablet held in the other direction.
- Photos pulled from an old camera that did not write orientation data.
- Images heading into a print layout that needs a specific orientation.
Rotation questions
Does rotating an image reduce its quality?
Rotating by exactly 90, 180 or 270 degrees is lossless for PNG and effectively lossless for JPEG, because the pixels are simply rearranged. Rotating by an arbitrary angle such as 7 degrees does require resampling and costs a small amount of sharpness.
Why does my photo look correct on my phone but sideways elsewhere?
Because your phone reads the EXIF orientation tag and the other program does not. Rotating the file here writes the correct orientation into the actual pixel data, which fixes it everywhere.
Can I rotate by a custom angle?
The standard quarter turns are the common case and are handled here. Straightening a crooked horizon by a few degrees is a slightly different job and normally needs a crop afterwards to remove the blank corners.
What is the difference between rotating and flipping?
Rotating turns the image around its centre. Flipping mirrors it, producing a reversed image where any text reads backwards. They are different operations with very different results.
Is my photo uploaded to a server?
Yes. Your photo is sent to our server to be rotated, but it is not stored after processing.
