Flip or mirror an image online
Flipping creates a mirror image. A horizontal flip swaps left and right, as if you were looking at the photo in a mirror; a vertical flip swaps top and bottom. Enabling both is the same as rotating by 180°. This flip image tool applies the transformation to the full-resolution image and lets you save it in the format you need.
When you need to flip an image
- Selfies: front cameras often save a mirrored picture, so text on your shirt reads backwards. A horizontal flip fixes it.
- Design balance: a portrait looking out of the page can be flipped to face the text instead.
- Iron-on transfers and screen printing: designs must be mirrored before printing so they read correctly on fabric.
- Reflections and patterns: flipped copies are the basis of symmetric compositions.
Worked example: mirroring a design for a transfer print
Iron-on transfer paper and sublimation prints are applied face down, so the artwork must be printed mirrored. A reliable routine:
- Load the design and keep ⇋ Horizontal on. Any text in the preview should now read backwards; that is how you know the flip is right.
- Save as PNG so sharp edges and transparent areas stay intact.
- Print at 100% scale. Many printer drivers and transfer apps have their own "mirror" or "T-shirt transfer" option. If you flipped the image here, turn that option off, otherwise the two flips cancel out and the shirt ends up with reversed text.
Flipping is also its own undo: flip the downloaded image again in the same direction and you get the original pixels back, with no loss when you save as PNG.
Flip versus rotate
Rotating turns the whole picture around its centre and keeps text readable (though tilted); flipping reverses it. A vertical flip is not the same as a 180° rotation — text flipped vertically is upside-down and mirrored. Use rotate image when a photo is simply sideways.
Things to watch
Flipping photos that contain text, logos, clocks or recognisable landmarks makes them look wrong to viewers, so check the result before publishing. For CSS-only mirroring on a website, you can use transform: scaleX(-1) instead of editing the file; the CSS transform generator writes that code for you.
Output
PNG output is lossless; JPG and WEBP use the quality you set. The original dimensions are kept.
Combining with other edits
You can chain the image tools: flip a selfie, then crop it to a square with the image cropper, and finally reduce its size with the image compressor. Each tool downloads a new file, so keep your original untouched in case you need to start again. The downloaded image contains no EXIF metadata, because it is generated from the pixels on a canvas.
Privacy
Everything happens locally in your browser with JavaScript and the Canvas API. Your images are never uploaded to our servers, so the tool also works with confidential screenshots and personal photos.