How to use Rotate & Flip Image
- Choose a JPG, PNG or WebP image.
- Turn it with Rotate 90° left, Rotate 90° right or Rotate 180°, or flip it horizontally or vertically.
- Select Apply rotation, check the preview and download.
Useful to know
A 90° turn swaps width and height. Leave Straighten at 0° when that turn, or a flip, should move pixels exactly. JPG and WebP are saved again at the quality you set.
How to rotate, flip or straighten a photo
- Choose one JPG, PNG or WebP. It stays in this browser tab, up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels. A phone photo with an orientation tag is shown upright.
- Select Rotate 90° left, Rotate 90° right or Rotate 180°, and Flip horizontal (mirror) or Flip vertical if you need a mirror. The buttons combine and the preview updates before you download.
- Move Straighten only when the horizon is slightly tilted. It runs from −45° to 45° and starts at 0°, which keeps a quarter turn or a flip pixel-exact. Choose Crop empty corners or Fill background colour.
- Choose JPG, PNG or WebP, select Apply rotation, and download. A 90° turn swaps the width and the height. Reset returns to the upright picture.
Why a phone photo is sideways
A phone often stores a landscape block of pixels and a small orientation tag that says which way those pixels should be shown. The camera app, Photos and most browsers obey the tag, so the picture looks upright on the device that took it. A website, a printer, an older editor or an upload form may ignore the tag and show the same file on its side. The pixels were never turned. Only a note was added beside them. That is why a photo can look correct in your camera roll and sideways the moment you attach it somewhere else.
This page reads that note when the file is a JPEG. If the tag says the photo should be rotated or mirrored for display, and the browser has not already done it, the pixels are turned before you see them. The preview is the upright picture. Apply rotation then writes a new JPG, PNG or WebP whose pixels are already that way. You do not need the tag for the download to look upright. That is what fixing a sideways phone photo means here: the turn is baked into the pixels, not left as metadata the next app might skip. If a preview is still upside down, use Rotate 180°. If it is still on its side, use Rotate 90° left or Rotate 90° right. The tag covers eight directions, and the buttons cover the same set.
The orientation tag is not a location. Baking the visible direction into the pixels is not the same job as removing a GPS pin, a camera model or a capture date. Those blocks are not copied into the canvas file, because the download is a new picture rather than a rewritten copy of the original container. This page does not scan the download and it will not tell you that a metadata strip succeeded. Use the EXIF metadata remover when you need that check spelled out on the result. Anything you can see, including a face, a door number or a street sign, is still in the picture after the turn.
Rotate, flip, and a mirror selfie
Rotate turns the picture around its centre. Rotate 90° right turns it clockwise. Rotate 90° left turns it anticlockwise. Rotate 180° turns it upside down. A 90° turn swaps the width and the height: a 1920 × 1080 frame becomes 1080 × 1920. A 180° turn keeps the width and the height. The line under the result shows the real size before you download, which matters when a slot was landscape and the turned file is now portrait.
Flip is a mirror, not a turn. Flip horizontal (mirror) swaps left and right. That is the control for a mirror selfie, for text that reads backwards in a front-camera shot, and for a design that will be ironed onto a shirt. Flip vertical swaps top and bottom, which is the control for a reflection or for a scan that came out inverted. Neither flip changes the width or the height. A sideways photo is almost never a flip. If the horizon is vertical, turn it. If the face is upright and the lettering is backwards, mirror it.
The buttons combine, and each one applies to the picture you see now. Rotate 90° right and then Flip horizontal is a different picture from Flip horizontal alone, and you can add Flip vertical on top. The summary under the buttons names the combination. Reset returns to the upright preview, including a phone photo that this page has already set upright from its orientation tag, and it returns Straighten to 0°. The preview updates as you click, so you can judge the corners before you encode a file. There is no separate mirror page and no separate flip page. Both jobs live on this one.
Turning a photo is not a crop and it is not a resize. If you need to cut a margin after the turn, use the crop tool. If a form asks for an exact width and height, or for a print size in centimetres, use the image resizer on the download. If the turned file is too heavy for an email or an upload, use the image compressor. Do those jobs from the new file, or go back to the original and run them in whatever order the form actually asked for. This page will not crop a face out or chase a kilobyte target while it turns the pixels.
Straighten a tilted horizon
Straighten runs from −45° to 45° and starts at 0°. Leave it at 0° when you only want a quarter turn or a flip. At 0° those moves copy pixels to their new places. A right angle does not resample the photograph, so a PNG of that result is the same pixels in a new order. Drag the slider only when the horizon, a document edge or a shelf is a few degrees off and a 90° button would be too much.
Any other angle is a different kind of edit. The browser has to calculate new pixels along the tilted edges, so even a PNG is no longer a pure rearrangement. Fine detail, hair and small type can soften slightly. That is the cost of a free angle, and it is why the slider is not the control for a sideways phone photo. Put the slider back to 0° and use Rotate 90° left or Rotate 90° right for that. The quarter-turn buttons stay exact whenever Straighten reads 0°.
Empty corners appear because a tilted rectangle no longer fills a straight frame. Crop empty corners keeps the largest upright rectangle of the same shape that still sits inside the photo, then trims one extra pixel inside that rectangle so the frame does not pick up a bare corner. The width and the height both shrink a little, and the shape stays close to the original. Fill background colour keeps every pixel of the tilted photo and paints the colour you choose into the new corners. The frame gets larger. White is the starting colour. Choose a colour close to the page or the mount if those corners will be seen. JPG output has no transparency, so clear pixels are painted with that colour even when you crop. PNG and WebP can keep a clear background when you are not filling corners and the source actually had one.
What a new JPG does to quality
A quarter turn or a flip does not invent detail and, with Straighten at 0°, it does not throw detail away by resampling. The file format you choose can still change the file. JPG and WebP on this page are encoded again at the quality you set, which starts at 82 and runs from 10 to 100. That is a new lossy save. A high number keeps more fine texture and usually makes a larger file. A low number is softer and smaller. PNG is written losslessly, so a quarter turn or a flip saved as PNG does not add a JPEG pass on top of the pixels you already have. Damage that was already in a JPG stays in those pixels. A free-angle straighten still resamples, PNG included, because the new edge pixels did not exist in the source.
Saving the download as JPG and rotating that JPG again adds another lossy pass, even when the quality number looks high. Keep the camera original as the master. If the first result is the wrong way up, press Reset or change the buttons, and run Apply rotation from the original rather than from the file you just saved. One image at a time, up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels. There is no batch list and no zip. A very large straighten, which grows the frame to hold the tilted photo, still has to fit that same pixel ceiling. The page stops rather than building a canvas the browser cannot hold.
The file stays on this device
The browser reads the image, applies the turn or the mirror, and builds the download in this tab. Image Cosmos does not receive the file, store a copy, or keep a history of the job. Closing or reloading the page drops the temporary link. That matters for unpublished work and for photos you would not put on a shared server. Advertising on this page does not receive the picture. The two advertisement units sit outside the workspace, and neither of them is a file upload.
Check the preview at a size close to the way you will use the file. A phone screen can make a mirrored selfie look finished when a sign in the background is still backwards, or the other way round. Trust the result width and height, especially after a 90° turn, because a frame that used to fit a landscape slot may now be portrait. If you will edit further and you want later saves to stay lossless, download PNG. If you are sending a photograph to a form that asked for JPG, download JPG once, at a quality you have looked at, and keep the original beside it.
| Job | What happens to the pixels | Width and height |
|---|---|---|
| 90° left or right, Straighten at 0° | Pixels move as a block. A PNG of this result is not resampled. | Swapped. |
| 180°, flip horizontal, flip vertical | Pixels move as a block. Flip horizontal is the mirror. The buttons can be combined. | Unchanged. |
| Straighten other than 0° | New pixels are calculated, so the photo is resampled in every format. | Crop shrinks both sides. Fill grows the frame and paints the background colour. |
| JPG or WebP download | A new lossy encode at the quality you set, which starts at 82. PNG stays lossless for a quarter turn or a flip. | Whatever the turn or the straighten produced. |
Related image tools
Frequently asked questions
Why does a phone photo look sideways until I rotate it?
The camera often stores the pixels on their side and adds an orientation tag that says how to display them. Photos and most browsers obey the tag, so the picture looks upright on the phone. A site, a printer or an older editor may ignore the tag and show those same pixels sideways. This page shows the upright picture and, when you apply the rotation, writes a new file whose pixels are already that way. The next app does not need the tag.
What is the difference between rotating a photo and flipping it?
Rotate turns the picture. Rotate 90° right is clockwise, Rotate 90° left is anticlockwise, and Rotate 180° turns it upside down. A 90° turn swaps width and height. Flip is a mirror. Flip horizontal swaps left and right without turning the picture, and Flip vertical swaps top and bottom. Neither flip changes the width or the height. Use a turn to fix a sideways frame. Use a flip when the picture is already upright but reversed.
How do I mirror a selfie so writing in the background reads correctly?
Open the photo and select Flip horizontal (mirror). Front cameras often save the view you saw in the screen, so lettering behind you can read backwards. One horizontal flip swaps left and right. It does not turn the photo on its side. If the face was also sideways, turn it with Rotate 90° left or right first, then flip. Reset clears both. The preview updates as you click, so you can read the background before you download.
Does rotating a JPG lose quality?
The turn itself, at a straight angle with Straighten left at 0°, moves the decoded pixels and does not resample them. Saving a JPG or a WebP still encodes those pixels again at the quality you set, which starts at 82, so a low number can soften the file. PNG output of a quarter turn or a flip is lossless. Any Straighten angle other than 0° calculates new pixels, including for PNG. Keep the original, and do not rotate the downloaded JPG a second time.
Does a 90 degree rotation change the image dimensions?
Yes. Rotate 90° left and Rotate 90° right swap the width and the height. A 1920 × 1080 picture becomes 1080 × 1920. Rotate 180°, Flip horizontal and Flip vertical keep the width and the height. Straighten at 0° does not add a further change. Above 0°, Crop empty corners makes both sides a little smaller, and Fill background colour makes the frame larger so the tilted photo still fits. The result line is the size you will download.
Can I combine a rotation and a flip, then start again?
Yes. Each button applies to the picture you see. Rotate 90° right and then Flip horizontal is a different result from either button alone, and Flip vertical can be added as well. The summary under the buttons names the combination. Reset puts the preview back to the upright picture, including a phone photo this page has already set upright from its orientation tag, and it returns Straighten to 0°. Changing your mind does not upload anything.
Is my photo uploaded when I rotate it, and does the download keep the location?
The photo is not uploaded. The browser reads it, turns or mirrors it, and builds the download in this tab. Image Cosmos does not receive the file or keep a job history. The new file is drawn from the visible pixels, so a GPS pin is not copied across as a side effect. This page does not scan the download or confirm that every metadata block is gone. Use the EXIF metadata remover when you need that check. A face or a street sign you can see is still in the picture.