Rotation and flipping, done in the browser
The preview here is a CSS transform, which costs nothing and updates instantly as you click. Only when you press Apply does the image get decoded and redrawn into a real canvas at full resolution, then encoded once. That keeps the interaction snappy on large photos while making sure the file you download reflects exactly what you saw.
Rotation and flipping compose in a fixed order internally — the canvas origin moves to the centre of the output, the rotation is applied, then the mirroring — so the result is the same regardless of which buttons you pressed first. That predictability is the whole reason the tool has a preview rather than a set of fire-and-forget buttons.
EXIF orientation and why photos arrive sideways
Digital cameras record images in whatever orientation the sensor sits, then write an EXIF orientation tag describing how a viewer should present it. Honouring that tag is optional, and plenty of software skips it. The practical result is a photo that looks upright in your phone's gallery and lands on its side once uploaded to a website or opened in an older editor.
Rotating here writes the correct orientation into the pixel data itself. Every viewer agrees on the result afterwards, because there is no longer a tag for anyone to disagree about.
Quarter turns are lossless in principle
A 90, 180 or 270 degree rotation is a pure remapping: each source pixel lands exactly on a destination pixel with no interpolation and no blending. Nothing is invented and nothing is averaged away.
The one place quality can slip is the export. Writing the result as JPG or WebP runs it through a lossy encoder, and each such pass compounds with any that came before. If the source was already a JPG, keep the quality slider high. If you need a guarantee, export as PNG — the transform plus a PNG export together are genuinely lossless.
Common uses
- Turning a sideways phone photo upright before printing or sharing
- Correcting a scan that came out of the scanner rotated
- Mirroring a selfie so text in the background reads correctly
- Flipping a diagram or logo to face the other direction in a layout