Turn a picture upside downFlip it the right way up
See a 180° turn and a top-to-bottom flip side by side, and keep the one you meant.
or drop it here — pasting works too
Drop one picture to work on it, or a folder of them to turn the lot by their own tags.
No photo handy?
FreeNo sign-upPhotos stay on your device
A 180° turn and a top-to-bottom flip, side by side from your own picture, because they are not the same thing.
The picture opens already turned 180°. The flip is beside it if that is what you meant.
Two operations that look alike for a second
Turn a photo of a street sign by 180° and the sign is upside down but its letters are still letters. Flip the same photo top to bottom and the sign is upside down and its letters are mirror images. On a picture with no writing and no obvious left or right, the two can be hard to tell apart — which is exactly why this page puts both side by side, drawn from your own picture, before anything is saved.
The page opens on the 180° turn, because that is what “upside down” nearly always means: a phone held the wrong way up, a scan fed in head first. The flip is one press away.
What happens to the file
- A half turn maps the picture's frame onto itself, so nothing is cropped and no corner is exposed.
- For a JPEG whose size allows it, the compressed blocks are moved instead of decoded and written again; the readout says when that is the case.
- A file tagged with an orientation is turned from the way a phone shows it, not from its stored array.
The longer explanation, with diagrams, is in 180 degrees or a flip?. For all eight ways a picture can face, see rotate and flip.
Questions about this page
Is upside down a flip or a rotation?
Usually a rotation. A photo taken with the phone held upside down needs a 180° turn: the top goes to the bottom and the left goes to the right, and any writing is still writing, only upside down. A vertical flip mirrors the picture across its middle: the top goes to the bottom but the left stays on the left, so writing reads backwards. The two previews show the difference on your own picture.
Does a 180° turn lose quality?
Not for a JPEG whose width and height are whole numbers of compressed blocks: the blocks are rearranged without decoding and the written file is compared with the original, coefficient by coefficient. Other files are decoded, turned and written once.
Why does text read backwards after a flip?
Because a flip is a reflection. A reflection reverses handedness — a right hand becomes a left hand — and no amount of turning undoes it. If the text in your picture reads backwards after a flip, you wanted the 180° turn.
When is a vertical flip the right choice?
When the picture really is reflected top to bottom: a reflection in still water used as the main picture, a transparency scanned the wrong way, an image a program mirrored by mistake.
Upside Down