Image Rotator

How to use the Image Rotator

Drop in the image you want to turn.
Click a quick rotation for 90° steps, or drag the slider for a fine angle.
Press Rotate. Choose transparent corners if you plan to crop the result afterwards.

Why the canvas gets bigger

At 90° or 180° the rotated image fits a rectangle exactly — width and height simply swap. At any other angle the corners stick out, so the bounding box has to grow to contain them.

A square rotated 45° needs a canvas about 41% wider and taller, and the four new corner areas have no image data. They are filled with your chosen colour, or left transparent if you switch that on. Straightening a photo therefore usually means cropping slightly afterwards — rotate first, then use the Image Cropper to trim back to a clean rectangle.

Right-angle rotations are lossless — almost

Rotating by exactly 90, 180 or 270 degrees only moves pixels; no interpolation happens, so no detail is lost. Any other angle has to compute new pixel values by blending neighbours, which softens fine detail very slightly.

One caveat: because this tool re-encodes the file, a JPG saved as JPG goes through one more compression pass. Output is written at quality 92, so the loss is minimal, but for pixel-exact right-angle rotations of a JPG, a dedicated lossless rotation tool avoids it entirely.

Sideways photos and EXIF orientation

If a photo looks correct on your phone but sideways on a computer, the pixels were never rotated. The camera stored them in one orientation and added an EXIF tag saying "display this rotated". Some software honours the tag and some ignores it.

Rotating here fixes it permanently: the output has the pixels physically in the right place and no orientation tag, so it looks the same everywhere.

Frequently asked questions

Will rotating reduce quality?

Right-angle rotations move pixels without altering them. Other angles interpolate, which softens detail slightly. Either way the file is re-encoded once, at high quality.

How do I straighten a crooked horizon?

Use the fine slider — most crooked photos need less than 5°. Rotate, then crop the empty corners away with the Image Cropper.

Why are there white triangles in the corners?

Rotating a rectangle by a non-right angle leaves areas with no image data. Change the fill colour, switch on transparent corners, or crop them off afterwards.

Can I rotate several images at once?

Not currently — this tool handles one image at a time so you can check each result before downloading.