Flip an image
Edited in your browser · the file is never uploaded
Mirrors an image left-to-right, top-to-bottom, or both. Flipping is lossless: the pixels are reordered, not resampled.
How to flip an image
Flipping costs nothing in quality because it only reorders pixels: no interpolation happens, so the result is exactly as sharp as the original. Ticking both directions is the same as rotating 180°, which is occasionally the quicker way to think about it.
The usual reason people want this is a selfie. Front cameras show you a mirrored preview because that is what you are used to seeing, but most save the unmirrored version, so the photo looks subtly wrong to you and completely normal to everyone else. Flipping it horizontally gives you back the face you see in a mirror.
The one thing to check before flipping is text. Anything written in the image; a sign, a label, a watermark, a logo; becomes backwards, and it is easy to miss when the text is small or at the edge. Numbers on a clock face and vehicle registration plates are the classic ones people only notice after posting.
Worth knowing for the technical case: flipping is often used to double a training dataset for machine learning, and it is safe for most subjects and wrong for a few. Anything where handedness matters; text, road scenes in a country that drives on one side, medical images. Is corrupted rather than augmented by a horizontal flip.
Questions
No. Pixels are reordered rather than resampled, so it is exactly as sharp as the original. Saving as PNG keeps them bit for bit; saving as JPEG costs one more compression pass.
Front cameras show a mirrored preview but usually save the unmirrored version. Flip it horizontally to get the face you see in a mirror.
Yes, exactly.
Any text in the image becomes backwards. Signs, labels, watermarks and number plates are the ones people miss.
No. It is read into your browser, drawn to a canvas and read back. There is no server involved, which you can confirm by loading the page and then going offline.