Free Online Crop, Rotate and Flip Image
Your photo is decoded and edited in this tab. It stays local, including whatever its metadata says about where it was taken.
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How it works
The Orientation tag, and why photos arrive sideways
A camera rarely rotates pixels when you turn it. It writes an Orientation value from 1 to 8 into the EXIF APP1 segment and leaves the sensor data as captured, which is why the same photo appears upright in one app and on its side in another — one honours the tag and the other does not. This applies the recorded orientation before you draw a selection, so the crop box lines up with what you can see, and the exported file has the rotation baked into the pixels rather than into a tag some viewer may ignore.
- Selection rectangle
- Reported in source pixels, not screen pixels, so the numbers match what the exported file will be regardless of zoom.
- Aspect presets
- Free, 1:1, 4:5, 3:2 and 16:9. Locking the ratio while you drag is the reliable way to hit a platform's crop box.
- 90° rotation
- Quarter turns only, which is geometrically exact — no pixel is interpolated and no edge is softened by the rotation itself.
- Flip
- A mirror across the horizontal or vertical axis. Also exact, and the usual fix for a selfie that reads backwards.
- Re-encode
- The output is encoded fresh from the cropped pixels. For a JPEG that is one more lossy generation, so start from the original where you can.
How to use it
How to crop, rotate and flip an image online
- 01
Drag out the crop box
Pick a ratio preset first if the destination has a fixed shape.
- 02
Rotate or flip if needed
Quarter turns and mirrors apply to the whole image, not just the selection.
- 03
Export the result
The rotation is written into the pixels, so the file looks the same in every viewer.
Where it earns its keep
Where a quick crop settles it
- Squaring a photo for a profile picture that will be cropped to a circle anyway.
- Cutting a stranger, a licence plate or a whiteboard out of the edge of a shot.
- Turning a scan the right way up before it goes into a document.
- Un-mirroring a front-camera photo where the text in it reads backwards.
Questions
Crop, Rotate & Flip, answered
Does rotating a JPEG lose quality?
Here, slightly — the file is re-encoded from the rotated pixels, which is one more lossy generation. Dedicated lossless JPEG rotation exists but only works when both dimensions are multiples of the 8- or 16-pixel block size, so it cannot be offered reliably for every photo.
Is the photo uploaded while I crop it?
No. It is decoded into the page, edited on a canvas and re-encoded locally. Nothing about the image or its metadata is transmitted.
Can I recover the part I cropped away?
Not from the exported file — the cut pixels are genuinely gone. Keep your original, which is untouched on disk, and crop a copy.
Why is my very large photo scaled down?
iOS and Safari cap canvas area at about 16.7 megapixels, and older devices at 4096×4096. Above that the browser silently produces a blank canvas, so oversized images are clamped instead. On desktop the ceiling is far higher.