How to rotate an image
- Add your images to the dropzone, or press Browse files to select them.
- Choose an angle with the presets, or drag the slider for anything in between.
- Set the corner fill colour if you are using an angle other than a quarter turn.
- Press Rotate images and let the batch complete.
- Check the new dimensions listed beside each result, then download.
What this tool handles
- Quarter-turn presets for the everyday case, plus any angle from 0 to 359 degrees.
- Expands the output canvas so an angled image is never clipped at the corners.
- Applies one rotation across up to twenty files, which suits a folder of sideways scans.
- Lets you choose the colour that fills the triangular corners a free angle creates.
- Rewrites the pixels rather than setting an orientation flag, so the fix holds everywhere.
- Keeps PNG transparency and never adds a watermark.
Why photos come out sideways in the first place
Phones and most cameras record every photograph in the same physical orientation regardless of how you were holding the device. To make the picture appear the right way up, they write an EXIF orientation flag alongside the pixels, a small note saying "display this rotated ninety degrees".
Software that reads the flag shows the photograph correctly. Software that ignores it shows the raw pixels, which is why an image looks fine in your phone's gallery and lands sideways in a document, an upload form or an older desktop viewer. The flag is a suggestion, and plenty of programs never received the memo.
Rotating the pixels is the permanent fix
This tool does not adjust the orientation flag. It redraws the image at the angle you choose and saves the result, so the pixels themselves are now the right way up. Every program will agree, because there is nothing left to interpret.
That is what you want for anything being handed to someone else, a client, a printer, a submission portal. The rotation travels with the file rather than depending on the recipient's software behaving well. It also means the EXIF block is discarded in the process, which removes the flag along with the camera and location data.
Quarter turns versus free angles
- 90°: a clockwise quarter turn, the usual fix for a portrait photo lying on its side.
- 180°: upside down, common with scans fed into the tray the wrong way.
- 270°: a counter-clockwise quarter turn.
- Free angles: straightening a crooked scan or a horizon that tilts by a few degrees.
Quarter turns are lossless in geometry: the pixels move to new positions but none are invented or destroyed, and the image dimensions simply swap. Free angles are different. The pixel grid has to be resampled, which softens fine detail very slightly, and the rotated rectangle no longer fits the original frame. The canvas grows and triangular corners appear, which is what the fill colour is for.
Straightening a crooked scan
Most tilted scans are off by between one and three degrees. Set the slider to a small value, convert, and look at the result against a straight edge. Because the correction is small, the resampling softening is negligible, but the change in perceived quality is large. A document that sits square on the page reads as professional in a way a tilted one never does.
After straightening, the fill-coloured corners usually want removing. Send the result through the image cropper and trim just inside the edges, and the document looks as though it was scanned correctly the first time.
Local processing
Rotation happens on a canvas inside your browser, so nothing is uploaded and no server sees the file. That matters for the scanned contracts, forms and identity documents that make up a good share of what people rotate. If you only need a mirror image rather than a rotation, the flip tool is the right one, and the EXIF remover handles orientation flags without changing the pixels at all.