Rotate an image, or a hundred, with one setting
Most ways to rotate an image on Windows assume you have one picture open. ImageRotate assumes you have a queue. You set the turn once, watch it on a live preview, and every picture you loaded gets the same treatment when you press Rotate.
There are two kinds of fix here, and they are kept apart. Five buttons handle the coarse jobs: Left and Right for a quarter turn, Half for upside-down shots, Mirror to swap left and right, and Flip to swap top and bottom. Below them, the Straighten slider moves from -15° to +15° in steps of 0.1°, for the beach photo where the sea runs downhill.
Each row in the list shows whether a picture is portrait, landscape or square, with its pixel dimensions, so the shots lying on their side are easy to spot before anything runs.
How to rotate a picture batch, step by step
The header always spells out what is about to happen, for example "90° right, +1.4°, mirrored". Click any file in the list to preview the turn against that picture instead of the first one loaded, and use Start again to clear every setting at once.
Write as also lets one pass do two jobs. Rotate a stack of TIFF scans and write them out as PNG, or straighten a set of PSD exports and save them as JPEG, without opening a second program. Leave it on Same as the original to keep each file's own type.
- Choose Add photos, or drop pictures onto the window.
- Press Left, Right or Half until the preview stands the right way up. Presses add up, so Right twice is the same as Half.
- Use Mirror or Flip if the picture also needs reversing.
- Drag Straighten if the horizon is tilted. The readout next to the label shows the exact angle.
- Pick a Save location and a Write as format, then press Rotate.
Straighten a photo with a tilted horizon
Explorer's right-click menu can turn a selection left or right, but only in 90° steps. A horizon that is off by two degrees needs something finer, and that is what the slider is for.
A part turn cannot fit the original rectangle, so the picture is written onto a slightly larger canvas with the corners filled rather than cropped. You lose no pixels; trim the edges afterwards if you want a clean frame. A note under the slider appears whenever this applies.
Flip an image horizontally, and fix phone photos that turn twice
Mirror is a horizontal flip, the one you want for selfies that came out reversed or text that reads backwards. Flip turns the picture upside down along its horizontal axis. Either can be combined with a turn.
Phones often store a photo sideways and add a tag that tells viewers to rotate it. Tools that ignore the tag end up turning the picture a second time. Here the camera's own orientation is applied first, so what you see in the preview is what you get.
