Flip image

Rotating turns the whole picture around its centre, the way you’d turn a print on a table. Nothing is reversed, so writing still reads normally. Use it when a photo is sideways or upside down.

Flipping mirrors the picture. Left becomes right, or top becomes bottom, and any writing comes out backwards. Use it when the picture is reversed rather than tilted.

A vertical flip isn’t the same as turning a photo upside down. A 180° turn keeps the writing readable once you tilt your head; a vertical flip reverses it, like a reflection in still water. Flip both ways at once and you get the 180° turn.

Front cameras show you a mirrored preview, because that’s the face you know from the bathroom mirror. Many phones then save the unmirrored shot, so the photo looks reversed next to what you saw. One horizontal flip turns it back.

On an iPhone you can choose which version gets saved: Settings > Camera > Mirror Front Camera.

Writing caught in a mirrored shot, such as a T-shirt slogan or a shop sign behind you, reads backwards. A horizontal flip makes it readable again. The same trick fixes a slide or a negative scanned face down the wrong way.

A flip only moves pixels, but the file still has to be saved again. A flipped PNG is pixel-perfect, because PNG is lossless. JPG, WebP and AVIF are re-encoded once, at quality 90 out of 100, from your original.

Flip twice, or flip and then crop, and ToolHero still saves just once, starting from the original. Edits never stack up into extra losses.

Some desktop tools, such as jpegtran, can mirror a JPG without re-encoding by rearranging its compressed blocks. ToolHero doesn’t do that yet, so reach for one of those if a bit-exact flip matters to you.

Other apps only set a “mirrored” flag in the photo’s EXIF data and leave the pixels alone, and not every viewer respects that flag. ToolHero writes the mirrored pixels themselves, so the flip shows up everywhere.