Horizontal or vertical: which flip do you need?
Flipping makes a mirror image of a picture. There are two directions, and you can combine them:
| Flip | Also called | What it does | Common reason |
|---|---|---|---|
| Horizontal | Mirror, flip left-right | Swaps left and right | Selfies with backwards text, matching the direction of a layout |
| Vertical | Flip upside down, water reflection | Swaps top and bottom | Reflection effects, scans fed in upside down and mirrored |
| Both | Same as a 180° rotation | Rarely needed; use Rotate Image instead |
The big letter F in the tool flips the same way your images will, so you can check the direction before you add anything. Flip settings apply to every image in the batch, and changing them re-does the batch automatically.
Why selfies come out reversed
When you take a selfie, the phone shows you a mirrored preview because that is what you are used to seeing in a mirror. Some phones then save the photo mirrored too, others save it the way other people see you. If a T-shirt slogan, a sign or a book title behind you reads backwards, the photo was saved mirrored. A horizontal flip fixes it in one click.
The same trick is useful for:
- Product photos where every item should face the same way on a shop page.
- Design layouts where a person in a photo should look into the page, towards the text, not out of it.
- Printing on transfers (iron-on T-shirt paper, some sticker films), which must be printed mirrored so they read correctly once applied.
- Learning drawing: artists flip their work to spot mistakes, because the brain sees a mirrored drawing with fresh eyes.
How flipping works in this tool
Each image is decoded in your browser, its rows or columns of pixels are swapped, and the result is saved in the same format. Nothing is uploaded.
- PNG is lossless, so the flipped PNG has exactly the same pixel values, just mirrored.
- JPG is saved once at quality 95 by default. That re-save is not visible, and the result looks right in every app and upload form.
- Lossless JPG (in More options) does not touch the pixels at all. Instead it sets the EXIF orientation tag to “mirrored” (value 2 for horizontal, 4 for vertical). Browsers, phones and modern photo apps honour the tag; some upload forms and older programs ignore it and would show the original. Use it for your own archive, not for portals.
Because only positions change, a flipped image always has the same width and height as the original.
Worked example
An online shop has 18 product photos of shoes. Fourteen point left, four point right, and the grid looks messy.
- Choose Horizontal (mirror).
- Drop in only the four right-pointing photos.
- Download the ZIP. Each file is named like
sneaker-red-flipped.jpg, so you can tell them apart from the originals.
If the shoe photos have different shapes (some tall, some wide), you can drop them all in and use More options → Apply to to flip only portrait or only landscape images.
Things a flip cannot fix
- A sideways photo needs rotating, not flipping. Use Rotate Image.
- A slightly tilted horizon needs straightening by a few degrees, which requires cropping the corners.
- Faces look “wrong” after flipping? Faces are not perfectly symmetrical, and we are used to seeing ourselves mirrored. A flipped selfie is how other people actually see you.
After flipping
Add captions with the Meme Generator, trim the edges with Crop Image, or make the files smaller for the web with Compress Image. Every step runs in your browser, so your photos stay private from start to finish.