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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.
To rotate an image online, load it above, press the rotate button until it stands the right way up and download the result. Each press turns the picture 90°, so two presses fix an upside-down photo and three turn it 270°.
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.
Rotate a JPG or PNG in four steps
- Drop the photo into the tool above, or load it from a URL.
- Press rotate right or rotate left — each press turns it 90 degrees.
- Press twice for a picture that is completely upside down.
- Check the preview, then download the rotated 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?
Turning a picture in 90° steps moves pixels without blending them, so nothing is blurred. The tool does save a new file, though: a PNG stays lossless, while a JPEG is compressed once more, which is invisible at normal viewing sizes.
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?
A photo you pick from your device is rotated in your browser and is not sent to us. If you load an image from a URL instead, our server downloads that address first so your browser can open it, and a temporary copy is kept on the server.
