How to rotate a photo

A photo that appeared upright on your phone and sideways everywhere else is a common and slightly maddening problem with a simple explanation.

Crop and rotate
Whichever tool you use here, the file stays on your device. How that works

Step by step

  1. 1Add the photo.
  2. 2Rotate in ninety degree steps until it is upright.
  3. 3For a slight tilt rather than a full turn, rotate in small steps and crop the corners afterwards.
  4. 4Save the corrected version and use that one from now on.

Why it looks right on your phone and wrong elsewhere

Cameras often save the image in one orientation and add a note saying which way up it should be displayed. Software that reads the note shows it correctly. Software that ignores it shows the raw image, which is sideways.

That is why the same file can look fine in your gallery and wrong once uploaded to a form or opened on a different computer. Nothing changed about the photo, only whether the note was honoured.

Rotating and saving fixes it permanently, because the pixels themselves are rewritten the right way up. After that every piece of software agrees, with no note to ignore.

Questions

Why does my photo rotate itself when I upload it?

The site is ignoring the orientation note your camera saved. Rotating and saving the file removes the ambiguity.

Does rotating lose quality?

Turning by ninety degrees does not. Small angle corrections require cropping the corners.

Is the photo uploaded?

No.