Rotate an image by any angle
Turn a sideways photo upright, flip a scan the right way round, or nudge a crooked horizon by a couple of degrees. Quarter turns keep every pixel exactly; free angles enlarge the canvas so no corner is cut off. Rotate up to 100 images at once on your own device.
How to use the Rotate Image
- Add the images you want to turn.
- Pick a quarter turn, or choose Custom and type an angle such as -2.5 to straighten a tilted photo.
- Decide what fills the new corners on a free rotation: a colour, or transparency with a PNG output.
- Click Rotate and download the results.
Quarter turns versus free angles
Rotating by 90, 180 or 270 degrees is a pure rearrangement: every pixel moves to a new position but keeps its exact value, and the width and height simply swap for the quarter turns. Any other angle requires resampling, because the new pixel grid does not line up with the old one. The tool uses the browser's high-quality interpolation, which is good, but a 3-degree rotation still softens very fine detail slightly — so rotate once from the original rather than repeatedly nudging a file.
The canvas grows to fit
A free rotation makes the image's bounding box larger. A 1000 × 600 photo rotated 10 degrees needs a canvas of about 1089 × 764 to contain all four corners. This tool always enlarges to that bounding box rather than cropping, so nothing is lost; the newly exposed triangles at the corners are filled with your chosen colour, or left transparent if you tick the transparency option, which forces PNG output. If you would rather have a clean rectangle with no corner wedges, rotate here and then crop.
Straightening a crooked photo or scan
Small negative or positive angles are the usual fix for a tilted horizon or a document scanned at a slight angle. Most crooked scans are within 5 degrees. Try 1 degree at a time, check the result, and remember the sign convention: positive values rotate clockwise. A scan that leans to the left needs a positive angle, one that leans right needs a negative one.
EXIF orientation, and why photos look sideways
Phone cameras almost always record the sensor image in one fixed orientation and add an EXIF orientation flag saying how to turn it for display. Browsers, phones and modern viewers obey the flag; a surprising amount of older software, and many upload pipelines, ignore it — which is why a photo that looks fine on your phone arrives sideways somewhere else. This tool decodes the image with the flag already applied and then bakes your rotation into the actual pixels, writing a file with no orientation tag at all. That is the reliable fix for the sideways-photo problem.
File formats
PNG input stays PNG, WebP stays WebP, and everything else is written as JPG at quality 92. Ticking the transparency option always produces a PNG, since neither JPG nor a flattened output can hold empty corners.
Frequently asked questions
Does rotating lose quality?
A 90, 180 or 270 degree turn moves pixels without changing them. Any other angle resamples the image, which softens fine detail very slightly. Saving a JPG also re-compresses it, so work from the original when you can.
Why did my image get bigger in pixels?
A free rotation needs a larger canvas to hold the rotated rectangle. The tool enlarges rather than crops so no corner is cut off.
How do I straighten a tilted photo?
Choose Custom and try a small angle — most tilts are under 5 degrees. Positive turns clockwise, negative anticlockwise.
Will the rotation stick when I upload the photo elsewhere?
Yes. The rotation is written into the pixels and the output carries no EXIF orientation flag, so software that ignores that flag still shows it the right way up.
Privacy
This tool runs entirely inside your browser using WebAssembly and the Canvas/File APIs. Your files are never uploaded to ToolFlint or any third party; you can verify this in your browser's network tab or by switching to airplane mode after the page loads. Read how we process files.
Last updated 2026-09-23.