A photo that looked fine on your phone shows up sideways on a website, in an email or on a laptop. It is one of the most common photo problems, and the fix takes a few seconds. You can rotate an image online free with our Rotate Image tool, with no app and no account.
Why is my photo sideways?
Your phone camera does not always turn the picture itself. Often it saves the image in the sensor's direction and adds a small note to the file saying which way is up. Your gallery app reads that note, so the photo looks right there. Some websites, email programs and older apps ignore the note, so the same photo appears sideways or upside down.
Rotating the image fixes this for good. The pixels themselves are turned, so the photo looks the same everywhere you send it.
How to rotate a photo 90 degrees
- Open the Rotate Image tool and upload your photo.
- Set the angle. It turns clockwise, and it starts at 90 degrees.
- Check the preview, then download the result.
Pick the angle by what you see:
| Your photo looks like | Angle to use |
|---|---|
| Lying on its left side | 90 |
| Upside down | 180 |
| Lying on its right side | 270 |
Straighten a tilted photo
The angle slider moves in one-degree steps from 0 to 360, so it also works for small fixes. If a horizon, a doorway or a wall leans a little, try 1 to 3 degrees. If it leans the other way, go from the top instead: 359 turns it one degree the other way, 358 two degrees, and so on. Look at a straight line in the photo and stop when it sits level.
Expand Canvas: keep the corners or keep the size
When a photo turns by anything other than 90, 180 or 270 degrees, its corners stick out past the old frame. The Expand Canvas option decides what happens to them:
- On: the canvas grows so the whole photo fits, and no corner is cut off. You get white space around the edges, which you can crop away afterwards.
- Off: the image keeps its original width and height, so the corners that stick out are trimmed.
For a slight straighten, turning it off is usually tidier. For a large or odd angle, keep it on so nothing is lost.
Rotate or flip?
Rotating turns the picture around its centre. Flipping mirrors it, like looking in a mirror. If your selfie shows text backwards or your parting on the wrong side, that is a mirror image, and the Flip tool is the one you want, not Rotate.
Does rotating lose quality?
Turning a photo by 90, 180 or 270 degrees just moves the pixels to new places, so the picture stays as sharp as it was. A small custom angle has to redraw the pixels at a slant, so very fine detail can soften slightly. The result comes back as a PNG file, which does not add compression of its own. PNG files can be larger than the JPG you started with; if you need a smaller file, compress it afterwards.
Do I need an account?
No. The tool is free, works in your browser on a phone or a computer, and takes images up to 25MB. Your photo is processed to make the rotation and is not kept on our servers.
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