Rotate an image
Turn a sideways photo upright — never uploaded.
How it works
Three steps, and nothing leaves your device.
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1
Drop in the image
The preview shows the current orientation, including any rotation your camera recorded.
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2
Turn it upright
Rotate in 90° steps until it sits the right way up. The preview turns with it, so you can see the result before downloading.
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3
Download the fixed image
The rotation is baked into the pixels, so it looks the same in every application.
Why photos appear sideways in the first place
- Most sideways photos are not actually rotated. Phone cameras record the image in the sensor's orientation and add an EXIF tag saying which way up it should be shown. Software that reads the tag displays it correctly; software that ignores it shows the raw sideways frame. That is why the same photo looks right on your phone and wrong after uploading.
- Rotating here fixes it permanently. This tool re-encodes the pixels in their new orientation rather than setting a tag, so the result looks the same everywhere — including in the applications that caused the problem by ignoring the tag.
- 90° rotation is lossless in shape but not in encoding. Turning an image by a quarter turn swaps its width and height without resampling anything. The file is re-encoded on save, so a JPG will go through one more compression pass; the visible effect at high quality is negligible.
- Only quarter turns, and that is deliberate. 90°, 180° and 270° move whole pixels to new positions: nothing is resampled and no corner falls outside the frame. An arbitrary angle requires both — the image has to be interpolated, and either the corners get cut off or the frame grows and gains blank wedges. A tool that hides that choice from you tends to make the wrong one.
- Looking for a mirror image instead? Rotating turns the frame; mirroring reverses it, so left and right swap. If your photo is reversed rather than sideways — a selfie, most often — Flip Image is the tool you want.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my photo look correct on my phone but sideways elsewhere?
Your phone reads the EXIF orientation tag; the other application does not. Rotating the image here writes the correct orientation into the pixels themselves.
Does rotating reduce quality?
No. The rotation moves pixels without resampling them. Saving re-encodes the file once, which at high quality is not visible.
Can I rotate by an arbitrary angle, like 5°?
Not here. Quarter turns are the rotations that need no resampling and no cropping; any other angle forces the image to be interpolated and then either cropped or padded. This tool sticks to the lossless case.