Rotate an image online
Turn photos 90°, 180° or any angle with a canvas that grows to fit and a background fill you choose. Batch rotate, private and instant.
- Runs in your browser
- Files are never uploaded
- Free, no account
How to rotate an image
- Drop in one or more photos.
- Use the 90° left, 90° right and 180° buttons for quarter turns, or the angle slider and number box for anything in between — down to a tenth of a degree.
- Pick what fills the corners that open up at odd angles: transparent, white, black or a colour you choose.
- Watch the live preview, then press Rotate and download individually or as a ZIP.
Why photos come out sideways
A phone or camera sensor is fixed in the body, so it always reads out pixels in the same
orientation no matter how you hold it. Rather than rotating the data, the camera writes an EXIF
tag — Orientation — recording which way was up. Software that honours the tag
displays the photo correctly; software that ignores it shows the raw sensor readout, which is
why the same file can look upright in your gallery and rotated 90° in a web form, an email
client or an old desktop viewer.
Rotating here bakes the orientation into the pixels. The exported file needs no tag to look right, so it displays identically everywhere. That is usually what you want before uploading to a system you do not control.
| EXIF orientation | Meaning | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Normal | Nothing to do |
| 3 | Rotated 180° | Rotate 180° |
| 6 | Rotated 90° counter-clockwise | Rotate 90° right |
| 8 | Rotated 90° clockwise | Rotate 90° left |
| 2, 4, 5, 7 | Mirrored variants | Use flip as well |
Right angles are lossless; odd angles are not
At 90, 180 and 270 degrees each source pixel lands exactly on a destination pixel, so the rotation is a pure rearrangement — nothing is interpolated and nothing is lost. At any other angle the grid no longer lines up, so every output pixel is a weighted blend of its neighbours. That is unavoidable in every image editor, and it very slightly softens the finest detail. If you only need to straighten a scan by a degree or two the effect is imperceptible.
The corners, and what to do with them
Rotating a rectangle by an arbitrary angle produces a larger bounding box with four empty triangles. This tool grows the canvas to fit rather than cropping, so no part of your image is lost, and fills the triangles with your chosen background. For a new width W′ and height H′ from an original W × H at angle θ:
W′ = |W·cos θ| + |H·sin θ|
H′ = |W·sin θ| + |H·cos θ|
Transparent corners require PNG or WebP output — JPEG has no alpha channel, so a transparent choice falls back to white. If you would rather have no corners at all, rotate first and then trim them off with the crop tool.
Straightening a crooked scan or horizon
- Find a line in the image that should be level — a horizon, a door frame, the edge of a page.
- Nudge the angle by ±0.5° at a time and watch that line against the edge of the preview panel.
- Once it is level, crop inwards to remove the filled corners. Expect to lose 2–5% of the frame for every degree of correction.
Questions
Why is my photo sideways in the first place?
Phones and cameras usually save the sensor image unrotated and record an EXIF "orientation" tag instead. Software that ignores the tag shows the photo on its side. Rotating here bakes the correct orientation into the pixels, so it looks right everywhere.
What happens to the corners at odd angles?
The canvas grows to the rotated bounding box, so nothing is clipped, and the four triangles left over are filled with the background you pick — transparent, white, black or a custom colour. Transparent needs PNG or WebP output; JPEG will fall back to white.
Does rotating by 90° lose quality?
The pixel grid maps exactly at 90, 180 and 270 degrees, so no resampling happens. At arbitrary angles the pixels are interpolated, which very slightly softens fine detail — unavoidable in any editor.
Can I straighten a crooked scan?
Yes. Use the angle slider or type a decimal value such as -1.4 to level a horizon or a scanned page, then crop away the filled corners with the crop tool.