Upright on your phone, sideways everywhere else
Phones and cameras often store a photo in the orientation of the sensor and add a small EXIF tag that says how to turn it for display. Your phone's gallery reads that tag, so the photo looks right. Some programs, websites and printers ignore the tag, or the tag gets lost along the way, and the same photo suddenly appears on its side.
This tool saves the pixels themselves in the upright position, so the rotated file looks the same everywhere, whether or not a program reads the orientation tag. Our guide on what EXIF is explains the tag in more detail.
How to use it
- Add one photo or several.
- Use the buttons to rotate 90° left, 90° right or 180°, or to flip horizontally (mirror) or vertically.
- To straighten a tilted photo, move the fine-angle slider anywhere between -45° and +45°.
- Choose how to handle the corners that appear after a fine rotation: crop to fill, or fill the corners with a color or transparency.
- Check the live preview, which shows the first image. The same transformation is applied to every file in the batch.
- Download the results one by one or as a ZIP.
The rotation is done by your browser, so your photos are not uploaded. The output keeps the original format; JPG files are saved at quality 92 by default.
Straightening a tilted horizon
A sea horizon or a building that leans by a degree or two is easy to notice once you have seen it. Move the slider slowly while watching a line that should be level or vertical, such as the horizon, a door frame or the edge of a table.
Rotating by an angle that is not a multiple of 90° leaves empty triangles in the corners. You have two ways to deal with them:
- Crop to fill zooms in just enough to hide the empty corners. The photo stays clean, but you lose a little around the edges; the bigger the angle, the more you lose.
- Fill corners keeps the whole photo and paints the corners with a color you choose, or leaves them transparent. Transparency only survives in formats that support it, such as PNG or WebP; JPG cannot store it. This option suits scans and documents, where cutting the edges would remove content.
Rotate or flip?
Rotating turns the picture around; flipping mirrors it. Flip horizontally to fix a selfie where writing appears backwards, or to make a subject face into the page in a layout. Flip vertically is useful for reflections and some scanned material. Be careful with photos that contain text, signs or logos: mirrored writing is noticed immediately.
Frequently asked questions
Does rotating reduce quality?
The image is encoded again when it is saved. For JPG this means one more compression pass at quality 92, which is very hard to see. PNG output is lossless.
Why does my photo look fine on my phone but sideways on my computer?
The phone used the EXIF orientation tag and the computer program did not. Rotate the photo here once and the pixels themselves are upright. Remove EXIF also fixes the pixels of such photos when it removes the tag.
Can I rotate many photos the same way?
Yes. Add them all; every file gets the same rotation, flip and angle as the preview.