Rotate an image

Fix a sideways scan, straighten a photo that imported the wrong way up, or mirror an image horizontally. The rotation is written into the pixels themselves, so the result looks the same in every program — not just the one that happens to read orientation metadata.

How to use it

1. Open the Rotate Image tool and drop in your photo.
2. Pick 90°, 180° or 270° — or leave the rotation off and just mirror.
3. Optionally mirror the image horizontally or vertically.
4. Rotate, then download the result.

Why an image looks sideways in some apps but not others

When a phone or camera takes a photo, it does not usually rotate the captured pixels. It writes them in the sensor's native orientation and records how the device was being held in a small EXIF tag alongside them. Software that reads the tag draws the photo the right way up; software that ignores it draws the raw pixels, and the picture appears on its side.

That is why the same file can look correct in your phone's gallery and sideways once uploaded to a website. Rotating with this tool resolves the ambiguity permanently: the orientation tag is applied, the pixels are physically rearranged, and every program from then on agrees on which way is up.

Rotating and mirroring are different operations

Rotation turns the image around its centre while keeping the content the same way round — text in a rotated photo is still readable once you tilt your head. Mirroring reflects it, so text comes out backwards and anything asymmetric is reversed.

Both are lossless as geometry: no pixels are invented or thrown away, and a 90° turn simply transposes the width and height. You can combine them — a rotation and a horizontal mirror in one pass — when a scan came out both sideways and flipped, which happens with some document feeders and duplex scanners.

Only right angles, and why that is deliberate

This tool offers 90°, 180° and 270° and nothing in between. That is not a limitation so much as a promise: at right angles, every pixel maps exactly onto another pixel position, so the operation is geometrically lossless and the image stays perfectly crisp.

An arbitrary angle — straightening a photo by 3° to level a horizon, say — requires resampling every pixel from a weighted blend of its neighbours, which softens fine detail, and leaves triangular gaps at the corners that have to be cropped or filled. That is a genuinely different tool with its own trade-offs, and pretending otherwise inside a simple rotate button would quietly degrade your image.