Image Rotator

What the Image Rotator Does

This tool rotates an image in 90-degree steps. Three buttons cover the common cases — a quarter clockwise, a quarter anticlockwise, or a half turn — and the rotations are cumulative, so you can click your way to any multiple of 90 degrees.

Rotation happens on a canvas and the output is a PNG, a lossless format, so the rotated pixels are saved exactly with nothing thrown away.

How It Works

Drop or pick an image. It shows in the preview at its current rotation, starting at 0 degrees.

Each button adds to the rotation — plus 90, minus 90, or 180 degrees, wrapping around 360. For a quarter turn the canvas swaps width and height so the whole picture fits with no cropping.

Download saves the rotated canvas as a PNG with your original base name. The canvas re-encode means EXIF and GPS tags are dropped.

Processing pipeline

1. Decode locally. Your file is read and decoded into pixels in the browser — never uploaded.
2. Track the rotation. Each button click adds 90, minus 90 or 180 degrees, kept as a running total.
3. Draw onto a fitted canvas. The image is rotated onto a canvas sized to fit, swapping width and height for quarter turns so nothing is clipped.
4. Download the PNG. The rotated canvas is exported as a lossless PNG with your original base name.

Privacy

Your image is rotated entirely in your browser and never uploaded — there is no server.

The canvas re-encode strips all EXIF and GPS metadata, including the original orientation tag, so the pixels are physically rotated rather than relying on a flag.

No account, no stored copy; everything is gone when you close the tab.

Technical Details

Standards & references

• Canvas 2D rotation — The image is rotated with the canvas transform (translate then rotate) and re-drawn; for 90° and 270° the canvas dimensions are swapped so nothing is clipped.
• PNG (lossless) — Output is PNG, so a 90° rotation adds no compression loss — unlike re-saving a rotated JPEG, which would recompress the whole image.

Accuracy & Limitations

Rotation is in fixed 90° steps only — no arbitrary angles and no straightening. For a small tilt fix, such as 3 degrees, this is not the tool.

The output is a lossless PNG, so a rotated photo keeps full quality, but the file is larger than the equivalent JPEG. That is the honest trade-off versus rotating a JPEG in place, which would recompress and lose a little each time.

A quarter turn swaps the width and height — a 4000×3000 photo becomes 3000×4000 — while a 180° turn keeps the dimensions.

The canvas re-encode drops EXIF, including the orientation flag, so the downloaded image is physically rotated rather than depending on a tag that some viewers ignore.

Real-World Use Cases

When to use it — and when not to

To mirror an image use the image flipper; to straighten by a free angle you need a full editor; to shrink the rotated PNG, use a converter or the image compressor.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

• HTMLCanvasElement: toBlob() (MDN)
• CanvasRenderingContext2D: rotate() (MDN)

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