Free Online Image OptimizerTurning a photograph the right way up
A photograph that appears sideways in one application and perfectly upright in another has not been damaged. Both programs are reading the same pixels; they disagree about a note attached to them. Understanding that note explains most rotation problems, and this walks through fixing one for good.
Rotate or straighten a picture →
The picture is not sideways, the label is
Phones and cameras are rarely held level, so rather than rewriting the whole image when you turn the device, they record the pixels in one fixed arrangement and attach an orientation tag describing how it should be presented.
Software that reads the tag shows the photograph correctly. Software that ignores it shows the raw arrangement, which may be on its side. Web browsers honour it; a surprising amount of older desktop software, and plenty of upload processing, does not. Hence the same file looking right on your laptop and wrong once it has been posted somewhere.
Rotate an image resolves the argument by making the pixels themselves match what you see, so there is no longer a note to disagree about.
Choose the angle, then commit it
Stage the photograph and open the settings panel underneath. Rotation sits there as four buttons — 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees — rather than in the row of tools on the picture itself.
They are absolute rather than incremental, and that is easier to use than it first sounds. You are picking the final orientation instead of pressing a button repeatedly and counting, so a photograph that needs turning right is one press of 90 and a photograph that arrived upside down is one press of 180. Pressing 0 returns it to how it came.
Saving writes the rotation into the pixels themselves. From then on the file needs no tag to be read correctly and no program can render it differently, which is the whole point of doing this here rather than turning it in a viewer that only changes its own display.
Straightening a horizon is a different job
The buttons here work in ninety-degree steps, which fixes an orientation tag and nothing else. A skewed horizon needs a few degrees rather than a quarter turn, and that is a different operation: rotating by an arbitrary angle leaves wedge-shaped gaps at the edges which then have to be cropped away, so the picture loses a border and every pixel is recalculated.
Nothing here does that, and the omission is deliberate rather than pending. If a couple of degrees is what you need, do it wherever you edit and bring the result back for compressing.
Worth knowing
Where the tag lives
The orientation flag sits in the EXIF block, alongside the camera model and possibly the coordinates where the picture was taken. If you would rather none of that travelled with the file, the metadata page strips the lot — do the rotating first, since removing the tag from a file that still relies on it is how a photograph ends up sideways permanently.
Documents are a special case
Rotation is offered for PDFs too, and for a narrower reason: a document stores rotation per page and the renderer already respects it, so a scan that looks sideways in a reader comes out upright anyway. It rescues a document built wrongly, which is rarer than a sideways photograph and much harder to fix later.