Image Rotator

Rotating by 90°, 180°, or 270° is the common case: a phone photo saved sideways, a scanned document fed in the wrong way round, or a landscape shot that should be portrait. These quarter turns rearrange pixels without resampling them, so the result is exactly as sharp as the original.

Custom angles are for straightening rather than reorienting. A horizon that sits two degrees off level, or a document scanned slightly askew, needs a small correction. Any angle that is not a multiple of 90° requires the pixels to be recalculated and the canvas to grow to fit the tilted image, which is why the output is slightly larger.

Flipping mirrors the image rather than turning it. A horizontal flip swaps left and right, which is useful for selfies that came out reversed or for making a subject face into a layout instead of away from it. A vertical flip mirrors top and bottom and is mostly used for reflection effects.

One caution: flipping reverses any text in the picture. Signage, labels, and watermarks all become unreadable, so for photographs containing writing, rotation is usually what you actually want.

Cameras and phones usually record the sensor's native orientation and store how the device was held as an EXIF orientation tag. Software that reads the tag displays the photo the right way up; software that ignores it shows the raw sideways frame. That is why the same file can look correct in your gallery app and rotated on a website or in an upload preview.

Rotating and re-saving bakes the correct orientation into the pixels themselves, so the image appears the same way everywhere regardless of whether the software reads metadata.

For scanned paperwork, small rotations make a practical difference: text that sits level is easier to read, looks more professional in a submitted application, and is recognised far more reliably if the document later goes through text recognition.

Rotate first, then crop away the empty corners the rotation introduces, then compress to whatever size the recipient requires. Working in that order avoids compressing areas you are about to discard.