Rotate Image

How to rotate an image the right way up

Pick the direction first, then add your files. The small letter F above the buttons turns exactly as your images will, which makes it easy to tell “left” from “right” before anything is processed. Every image you drop in is rotated with the same setting, and changing the setting re-does the whole batch automatically.

Why photos come out sideways

A phone camera sensor always captures the picture in the same direction. When you hold the phone sideways, most phones do not turn the pixels; they save them as they came off the sensor and add an EXIF orientation tag, a small number from 1 to 8 that tells viewers how to turn the picture before showing it. Your gallery app reads the tag, so the photo looks fine there.

Problems start when a program ignores that tag. Some upload forms, older Windows programs, print kiosks and content management systems strip the metadata or never read it, and suddenly the photo shows up on its side. Rotating the pixels themselves fixes this for good: the picture is stored the right way up and needs no tag at all.

Two ways to rotate a JPG

Rotate pixels (default). The tool decodes the photo, turns the pixels and saves a new JPG at quality 95. The result looks right in every program. One re-save at quality 95 changes nothing you can see, but strictly speaking it is not bit-for-bit identical.

Lossless (orientation tag). Open More options and choose this to leave every pixel untouched and only change the EXIF orientation tag (adding one if the file has none). It is instant and keeps the exact original quality, which photographers like. The trade-off is the one described above: programs that ignore the tag will still show the old orientation.

PNG, WebP and other formats are always rotated by moving pixels. For PNG that is lossless by nature, so nothing is lost either way.

Rotate only the pages that need it

When you scan a stack of paper, a few pages often come out sideways while the rest are fine. Under More options → Apply to, choose Landscape only to turn just the wide pages (or Portrait only for the opposite). Images of the other shape are passed through untouched and keep their original file names, so you can download the whole batch as one ZIP and every page is upright. Then combine them into one document with JPG to PDF. If the pages are already in a PDF, use Rotate PDF instead.

Worked example

A teacher photographs 30 pages of handwritten homework on a phone. Twenty-two are portrait and correct; eight show up sideways in the school’s upload portal, with the top of each page pointing left.

1. Click Right 90° once (the letter F turns clockwise, so it lies with its top to the right).
2. In More options, set Apply to to Landscape only and leave the JPG method on Rotate pixels.
3. Drop in all 30 photos. The 8 landscape photos are rotated; the 22 portrait photos are left as they were.
4. Download the ZIP and upload, or merge them into one PDF.

Formats, quality and file names

• JPG, PNG, WebP and AVIF keep their format.
• iPhone HEIC photos are saved as JPG, and GIF and BMP as PNG, because those formats cannot be written in every browser and many sites do not accept them anyway.
• Rotated files get -rotated added to the name (IMG_2041-rotated.jpg), so they never overwrite the originals in your downloads folder.
• Photo info: the date, camera and location are kept by default (with the orientation tag reset to “upright”). Untick the option to remove them, or use EXIF Remover for full control.

Tips

• Mirror instead of rotate? Selfies often look reversed. That is a flip, not a rotation. Use Flip Image.
• Crop after rotating with Crop Image if the scan has dark borders.
• Too big to upload after rotating? Shrink it to an exact size limit with Compress Image to KB.
• Privacy: everything happens on your device, including the lossless method, so identity documents and family photos are never uploaded.