Flip Image
Flip an image horizontally for a mirror image, flip it upside down, or rotate it 90 degrees either way. It runs in your browser and saves as PNG, JPG or WebP.
What does it mean to flip an image?
Flipping reverses a picture across one axis. A horizontal flip swaps left and right and gives you the mirror image, the picture as a mirror would show it. A vertical flip swaps top and bottom. Rotating turns the picture a quarter at a time and doesn't mirror anything.
You'd flip an image to make a front-camera selfie match the mirrored preview you saw while taking it. Or to print an iron-on transfer for light fabric, which goes on face down, so it has to be printed mirrored to read the right way.
How to flip or rotate a photo
Flip horizontal, Flip vertical, Rotate left and Rotate right each change the preview straight away, and every click builds on the ones before it. Two rotations the same way make a half turn. So do both flips together.
Flips act on the picture as you see it, so after a quarter turn Flip horizontal still swaps left and right on screen. There's no Width on this page. Resize Image makes the turned picture smaller, and Crop Image cuts its 4:5 or 9:16 shapes from the picture as it stands, so do the turning here first.
However many times you click, there are only eight possible results: the picture in each of its four quarter turns, and each of those mirrored. They're the same eight cases a camera's EXIF orientation tag can describe. Order does matter, though. Flip horizontal then Rotate right gives a different picture from Rotate right then Flip horizontal, so watch the preview instead of counting clicks.
Settings for a selfie, an iron-on transfer and a sideways scan
A selfie with writing that reads backwards: Flip horizontal once. The front camera's preview is mirrored, and phones differ on whether they save the photo that way, which is how a sign or a printed shirt can come out reversed.
An iron-on transfer for light fabric: Flip horizontal and keep PNG so no detail is lost before printing. Some versions of Word only mirror the text box when you use Flip, leaving the letters reading forward, so save the design as a picture and flip the picture here. Up to 2048 pixels on the long side, every pixel is kept. That's enough for 6.8 inches at 300 pixels per inch, while a design filling a letter-size sheet comes out at about 186 pixels per inch. Transfer paper for dark fabric is usually printed the right way round, so check the pack's instructions before you flip.
A scan lying on its side: Rotate right or Rotate left until it's upright. Then save a photo as JPG at Quality 92, or a page of text as PNG.
Why does my face look strange in a flipped photo?
You mostly know your face from mirrors, so the mirrored version is the one you're used to. Everyone else sees the true one. Theodore Mita, Marshall Dermer and Jeffrey Knight tested this in 1977. Across two studies, people preferred a mirror print of their own face, while their friends or partners preferred the true print of the same photo. No face is perfectly symmetric, so a flip moves a parting or a crooked smile to the side you don't expect.
If you like the mirrored copy better, keep it for yourself. For a photo other people will see, post the version where any writing in the shot reads correctly, since that's the face they know.
Does flipping a picture lose quality?
A flip or a quarter turn moves every pixel to a new spot without blending any of them. So a PNG no more than 2048 pixels on its long side comes out with exactly the pixels it went in with. The line under the preview shows the new pixel and file size, with width and height swapped after a quarter turn.
Under the hood, the browser draws the picture through a transform matrix. A horizontal flip turns every x into -x, and a quarter turn swaps x and y and flips the sign of one of them. Each button multiplies its step onto the turns and flips you've made so far.
A JPG gets decoded and encoded again here. The jpegtran tool can turn a JPG losslessly by rearranging its compressed blocks, which a browser canvas can't do. One save at Quality 92 is hard to spot, but turning the same JPG over and over adds a little loss every time.
Why does a phone photo sometimes show up sideways?
Phones often save a photo the way the sensor was held and add an EXIF orientation tag saying how to turn it for display. Software that ignores the tag shows the photo sideways or upside down.
This tool opens the file with the tag already applied. The copy it saves has the turn baked into its pixels and no tag, so it looks the same everywhere.