Flip an image by opening it in a browser tool, choosing the flip direction, and downloading the result. To mirror an image left-to-right, use a horizontal flip. To turn it upside down, use a vertical flip. To do both at once, which is the same as rotating the image 180°, select both.
It takes about a minute. Every step runs on your own device, so there is no upload, no sign-up, and no watermark.
The direction is the only real decision in the whole process, and getting it wrong is why most people repeat it two or three times. Here is the fastest way to know which one you want before you touch anything.
| What you want | Direction | What happens to the image |
|---|---|---|
| A mirror image (left and right swapped) | Horizontal flip | Reflected across a vertical axis, like a mirror |
| An upside-down image | Vertical flip | Reflected across a horizontal axis, top becomes bottom |
| A half-turn | Horizontal + vertical | Same result as rotating 180 degrees |
| A rotated-but-not-mirrored image | Not a flip | Use a rotate tool instead. Flipping also reverses the image, rotating does not. |
That last row matters more than it looks. Rotating an image 180 degrees and flipping it both ways produce the same picture, which is why the two get confused. But rotating 90 degrees and flipping are completely different operations, and only one of them is reversible by repeating it. Two horizontal flips return the image to the original. One 90-degree rotation does not.
Select both Flip Horizontal and Flip Vertical. That is exactly a 180° rotation, and it is the fastest route when an image arrived sideways.
We tested the checklist above on the free tool on this site, in a normal browser, with a JPEG, a PNG with transparency, a WebP file, an animated GIF, and a BMP file. All five loaded, all five flipped, and all five exported in at least one of the three output formats.
Two limits we will state plainly rather than hide. First, an animated GIF is flipped on its first frame only, so you get a still image and not a reanimated one. Second, output format support is more useful than input format support: you can put in a BMP and still get out a PNG, which is often the actual goal if the original format is awkward to share.
We did not measure flipping speed on very large images, because that depends on your own machine far more than on the page, and we will not print a number we cannot stand behind.
The format matrix we keep coming back to is the one below. It is the thing most guides skip, and it is the first question people actually ask after the flip works: can I get the file back out in a shape I can use?
A note on what we deliberately left out. We did not add a comparison of editing suites, we did not list phone apps, and we did not rank any of it. Those turn a one-minute task into a fifteen-minute read, and the task is the point.
One more thing we checked that is easy to get wrong: flipping is exactly reversible. We flipped a test image horizontally, downloaded it, loaded the result back in and flipped horizontally again. The second output matched the original pixel for pixel. Same for vertical. So if you flick the wrong direction, the fix is one more click on the same button, not starting over.
We also checked what happens when you flip and then change the output format in the same pass. Going from a source PNG to a JPG output drops the transparency to white, which is expected but surprises people. Going from JPG to PNG keeps everything as-is. If you started with a logo on a transparent background, export as PNG or WebP, not JPG, or it will pick up a white box behind it.
| You put in | You can get out | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| JPG / JPEG | PNG, JPG, WebP | No transparency to lose. Usually the smallest output is JPG. |
| PNG | PNG, JPG, WebP | Export PNG or WebP to keep transparency. JPG will fill it white. |
| WebP | PNG, JPG, WebP | WebP output is normally the smallest of the three. |
| GIF | PNG, JPG, WebP | Only the first frame is flipped. The result is a still image. |
| BMP | PNG, JPG, WebP | A common reason to flip a BMP is to convert it at the same time. |
On this site, no. The image is decoded, flipped and re-encoded inside your browser, which is why there is no upload step and no waiting for a server to return a file. You can verify this yourself: open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, load an image, and flip it. No request carrying your image leaves the page.
That has a practical side effect worth knowing. Because nothing is uploaded, there is no server-side file size cap to bump into. The only ceiling is your own browser's memory.
Flip an image now — free, no upload