Rotate Image

How to use the Rotate Image

1. Drop an image onto the box or click to choose one.
2. Click Rotate left or Rotate right for quarter turns, and the flip buttons to mirror the picture.
3. Drag the Fine angle slider or type a value to straighten by any amount, including decimals.
4. Choose transparent or colored corners and a format, then click Download rotated image.

Features

• Quarter-turn rotation left and right
• Free rotation to 0.1° with automatic canvas expansion
• Horizontal and vertical flip
• Transparent or solid-color background for empty corners
• Pixel-exact output for 90° steps
• PNG, JPG or WebP download at full resolution

Quarter turns and flips

Rotating by 90°, 180° or 270° simply rearranges pixels: rows become columns and nothing needs to be recalculated. This tool draws quarter turns without any smoothing, so every pixel in the output is an exact copy of one in the original, and the width and height swap places. Flipping is just as exact. A horizontal flip mirrors the picture left to right, which is useful for selfies that came out reversed or for matching the direction of a layout. A vertical flip turns it upside down like a reflection in water. Note that a flip is not the same as a 180° rotation: rotation keeps text readable when turned around, while a flip mirrors it.

The controls act on what you see. If you flip first and then rotate right, the preview turns clockwise, just as you would expect.

Why photos come out sideways

Cameras and phones usually store the pixels the way the sensor captured them and add an EXIF orientation tag that says how to turn the picture for display. Apps that ignore the tag show the photo sideways. This page displays images with the orientation already applied, and the downloaded file has the rotation built into its pixels with no orientation tag, so it appears the same way everywhere.

Straightening by any angle

A tilted horizon is one of the most common photo flaws, and it usually only takes one or two degrees to fix. When you rotate by an angle that is not a multiple of 90°, the corners of the picture would stick out of the original frame. Instead of cutting them off, the canvas grows to fit:

new width = w × |cos θ| + h × |sin θ|
new height = w × |sin θ| + h × |cos θ|

For example, a 4000 × 3000 photo rotated by 5° becomes 4000 × 0.9962 + 3000 × 0.0872 ≈ 4246 pixels wide and 4000 × 0.0872 + 3000 × 0.9962 ≈ 3337 pixels tall. The four triangles that appear in the corners are filled with transparency or with the color you choose. To get a clean rectangle again, open the result in the Image Cropper and trim the corners off.

Choosing the right format

Every download is a newly encoded image. Choose PNG if you want zero quality loss, or keep JPG at 90% or higher so the extra compression is invisible. Specialized tools can rotate JPEG files by 90° without re-encoding, but only when the dimensions fit the format's 8- or 16-pixel blocks, so a high-quality re-encode is the practical choice in a browser.

Tips

• Use a building edge, a door frame or the horizon as your reference line and adjust in 0.5° steps.
• Straighten before you crop and resize; each step then works with the most pixels.
• Rotating several times does not degrade the result here, because the download is always rendered from your original.

Your image is processed on your device and never uploaded.

Frequently asked questions