Flip Image

Flipping is geometrically lossless. Every pixel keeps its exact colour and simply moves to a mirrored position — nothing is averaged, blended or discarded, so the mirrored image is pixel-for- pixel as good as the original.

The one cost is re-encoding. Saving a JPG means a fresh round of JPEG compression, which discards a small amount of detail — as it would with any tool that re-saves a JPG. This tool uses a high quality setting, so a single flip is invisible. PNG and WebP store the result losslessly, so they cost nothing at all.

The output keeps the format you started with, so a PNG stays a PNG with its transparency intact.

One practical note: flipping twice on the same axis returns you to the original image, but it does not undo the re-encoding. If you flip a JPG, save, and flip back, you have re-compressed it twice for no net change. Decide before you save.

When flipping is what you want

• Selfies and front-camera photos that look reversed compared to how you see yourself, or where a t-shirt slogan reads backwards.
• Scanned negatives or slides fed into the scanner the wrong way round.
• Iron-on transfers and heat-press printing, which must be mirrored before printing so they read correctly once applied.
• Design symmetry — mirroring an element to balance a layout.
• Matching a subject's direction, so a person or vehicle faces into the page rather than off the edge.

When flipping will quietly ruin the image

This is worth checking before you save, because the result often looks fine at a glance and wrong on closer inspection:

• Anything containing text. Signs, labels, packaging, number plates, watermarks and captions all become backwards. It is easy to miss on small text.
• Logos and brand marks, which are reversed and immediately look off to anyone who knows them.
• Photographs with a left/right meaning — a medical or dental image, a sports photo where the play direction matters, a map, or a photo of a keyboard or a vehicle whose steering wheel ends up on the wrong side.
• Faces, in some contexts. Human faces are not symmetrical, and people who know the subject well often sense that something is wrong without being able to say what.

If any of those apply, rotating or cropping is probably the operation you actually want.

Flip or rotate?

A quick way to decide: if the picture is sideways or upside down, you want rotate. If it is back-to-front — a mirror image of what it should be — you want flip. Both controls are available on this page, so you can combine them if an image needs turning and mirroring.

What happens to the metadata

Camera metadata, including GPS coordinates showing where the photo was taken, is not carried into the output. The EXIF orientation flag is applied to the pixels before being discarded, so the image you flip is the image you were looking at, and the result appears correctly in every program rather than being turned again by software that reads the flag.