Rotate & flip
Straighten a tilted photo, spin it in quarter turns, or mirror it, and watch the result update live before you save.
Rotate
Output settings
This format has no alpha channel, so the corners left empty by rotation need a solid colour underneath.
Related tools
Drop an image here
or · one image at a time
Preview
Drop an image above and it appears here. Rotate, flip and the preview updates as you go.
Straightening versus turning
Quarter turns and free rotation solve different problems. A photo taken with the phone held sideways needs a clean 90-degree turn — the content is fine, it's just oriented wrong. A photo of a horizon that's a few degrees off level needs a small free rotation instead, usually somewhere under 5 degrees, to bring it back to true without otherwise changing the composition.
Free rotation at any angle other than a multiple of 90 degrees necessarily makes the canvas bigger than the source image, because a tilted rectangle's bounding box is larger than the rectangle itself. The extra space appears as transparent corners, or a solid colour if the output format doesn't support transparency.
Flipping
Flipping mirrors the image along an axis rather than turning it. Horizontal flip swaps left and right, which is occasionally useful for correcting a selfie-camera mirror effect or matching the direction of motion in a composite. Vertical flip is rarer in practice but combines with rotation to produce any of the eight standard orientations a rectangle can sit in.
Choosing an output format for a rotated image
If the rotation isn't a multiple of 90 degrees, the result almost always has transparent corners, so PNG or WebP are the natural choices — both keep that transparency. Choosing JPEG instead forces a matte colour into those corners, which is fine for a photo destined for a plain white background but will show as an obvious rectangle on anything else.
Why is the output image a different size to the original?
Any rotation that isn't a multiple of 90 degrees makes the image's bounding box bigger than the original, because a tilted rectangle needs more horizontal and vertical space to contain it. The canvas is sized to that full bounding box so no part of the rotated image is cut off.
What fills the corners left empty by rotation?
Transparency, for formats that support it. JPEG has no alpha channel, so a matte colour — white by default, and adjustable — fills those corners instead.
What's the difference between rotating 180 degrees and flipping both ways?
For the whole image they look identical. The difference shows up with text or asymmetric detail: a 180-degree rotation keeps letters the right way round but upside down, while flipping both horizontally and vertically mirrors them as well — the two operations happen to coincide exactly at 180 degrees.
My phone photo looks sideways. Will rotating here fix it?
It shouldn't need fixing — Pixelbench reads the orientation tag stored in the file and displays the photo upright automatically, on this tool and every other one. If a photo still looks sideways after loading, use the quarter-turn buttons to correct it.
Can I flip and rotate at the same time?
Yes, they combine freely. Flips are applied before the rotation angle, so you can mirror a photo and then angle it however you like.