Why some photos look sideways
Phones and cameras often store a photo in its natural sensor orientation and add a small note saying “display this rotated”. Most apps obey the note, but some websites, editors and print services ignore it, so the picture appears sideways. Opening the image here applies the orientation and saving writes it into the pixels, which fixes the problem for every viewer.
Rotate vs flip
- Rotate turns the picture around its centre in steps of 90°. Rotating left or right changes landscape to portrait.
- Flip horizontal mirrors left and right, like a mirror image. Useful for selfies that were reversed, or for design layouts.
- Flip vertical mirrors top and bottom.
Note that flipping text makes it unreadable. If you flip a picture that contains words or logos, check that the result is what you intended.
Quality
PNG output is lossless. For JPG and WebP, the picture is re-saved at high quality, which has only a tiny effect on a single save. If you need a rotation with no recompression at all, use a desktop tool that rotates JPG data losslessly.
Next steps
Once the orientation is right, you might crop the picture, resize it for a platform, or remove its location data before sharing.
Privacy and limits
Processing is local. Nothing is uploaded. Very large images on phones are scaled to fit the browser’s limit of about 16 megapixels.