Horizontal vs vertical flip
The two options do very different things:
- Horizontal flip (mirror): the left side swaps with the right. Text becomes backwards, a person facing left now faces right. This is the one you want for selfies and most layout fixes.
- Vertical flip: the top swaps with the bottom. The image looks like a reflection in water. It is mostly used for creative effects or for scans that were fed into a scanner the wrong way.
If you only need to turn a sideways photo upright, you want rotation, not flipping. Flipping a sideways photo will leave it sideways and mirrored.
Fixing mirrored selfies and webcam images
Front cameras often save a mirror image, so a shirt logo or a street sign reads backwards. Video call apps and webcams also tend to mirror your own view. A horizontal flip fixes all of these.
A few signs a photo is mirrored:
- Text anywhere in the frame reads right to left.
- A watch or wedding ring appears on the wrong hand.
- Your hair parting is on the opposite side from what you are used to seeing in photos taken by others.
Interestingly, many people prefer the mirrored version of their own face because that is what they see in the bathroom mirror every day. Friends will usually prefer the unmirrored one.
Design uses
Flipping is a quick fix in layouts:
- Make a person or product face toward your headline instead of off the page.
- Create a symmetrical banner by placing the original and the mirrored copy side by side (the merge images tool can join them).
- Match the direction of arrows or hand-drawn elements across a set of slides.
Be careful with anything that contains text, logos, clocks or recognizable landmarks. Viewers notice backwards writing immediately, and a flipped brand logo can look like a mistake.
Quality and format notes
The output keeps the format of your file: a PNG stays a PNG with its transparency, a JPG stays a JPG. Because flipping just rearranges pixels, there is no blurring or resampling. The only change in a JPG or WebP is the light re-compression that happens whenever those formats are saved.
Some camera photos carry an EXIF orientation tag that tells viewers to rotate the image on display. Your browser applies that tag before flipping, so what you see in the preview is what you get in the download, and you will not end up with a photo that rotates unexpectedly in another app.
Images can be up to 8,000 pixels on each side. Larger scans or panoramas should be resized first.