Flip APNG Online

Mirror an APNG Left-to-Right or Top-to-Bottom

This page opens the xconvert Photo Editor on its Flip tab. Two buttons, Flip Horizontal and Flip Vertical, mirror the loaded picture across the corresponding axis; a Save dropdown writes the result out. It is a one-frame editor — it decodes a single frame of the file you hand it and the Save menu offers JPG, PNG, WebP, TIFF and BMP, with no APNG entry. An animated .apng therefore comes back as a mirrored still image, not a mirrored loop.

For a static .apng — and plenty of files with that extension are static, including every single-image APNG our own converters produce — this is exactly the right tool and the round-trip through PNG is lossless. For a real multi-frame animation, the "keep the loop" section below points at the route that works.

How to Flip an APNG

1. Select Your APNG: Click Select Image and choose the .apng or .png. The picker is not extension-filtered, so .apng appears in the list like any other file. Only the first file you pick is loaded, even if you multi-select.
2. Mirror It: Click Flip Horizontal to swap left and right, or Flip Vertical to swap top and bottom. Each button toggles, so clicking the same one twice returns the image to its original orientation, and clicking both once is the same result as a 180-degree turn.
3. Stack Another Edit (Optional): The Rotate, Resize and Crop tabs act on the same working image, so you can mirror first and then straighten or trim without re-loading the file.
4. Save the Result: Open the Save dropdown and pick a format. Choose PNG if the artwork has any transparency — it is the only small, lossless option here that carries the alpha channel.

Horizontal vs Vertical vs a 180-Degree Turn

The last two rows are the reason people mix these up: a 180-degree rotation and a horizontal-plus-vertical flip land on the same pixels, but a 90-degree turn cannot be reproduced by any combination of flips because it changes the image's width and height. If a turn is what you want, use the Rotate tab on the APNG rotator.

What Each Save Format Keeps

Measured by pushing a 200x120 RGBA frame with a transparent background through the page's own encoders:

Keeping the Loop Instead of Flattening It

If the file really is animated and the mirror has to apply to every frame, use Compress APNG. That route runs server-side: each uploaded file gets its own card with Rotate, Flip Horizontal and Flip Vertical buttons, and the chosen orientation is applied during a full re-extract-and-reassemble pass, so the frame sequence, the per-frame delays and the alpha channel all come out the other side. Processing happens locally in your browser — no sign-up, no watermark.

The other two options trade something away: APNG to GIF keeps the motion but caps you at 256 colours per frame and on/off transparency, and APNG to MP4 keeps the motion with far better compression but no alpha at all, because no mainstream video container carries a transparency channel.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does flipping here keep the animation?

No. We tested this with a purpose-built 3-frame APNG (200x120, a differently placed coloured circle in each frame). After the image was drawn into the editor's canvas and saved back out as PNG, only frame 1's circle was present and the saved file contained nothing but IHDR, IDAT and IEND — no acTL chunk, which is what makes a PNG animated. Use Compress APNG with the file-card flip buttons if the loop must survive.

Is a flip lossless?

The mirroring itself is: it maps every pixel to a new coordinate without resampling or blending, so no interpolation error creeps in. Whether the file stays lossless depends on the format you save to. PNG and TIFF are lossless; JPG and WebP re-encode with quantisation, so a flip-and-save round trip through either of those does soften the picture even though the geometry is exact.

Why did my mirrored image come out with a black background?

You saved as JPG, or as WebP. Both discard the alpha channel on this page, and the pixels sitting underneath a transparent region are stored as black, so that is what you see once the transparency is gone. Re-do the flip and choose PNG from the Save dropdown instead.

Can I flip a batch of sticker or emote variants in one go?

Not here — this editor holds one image at a time and downloads it directly rather than building a queue. If you need the same mirror applied across a folder, Compress APNG accepts multiple files in a session and each file card carries its own Flip Horizontal / Flip Vertical control.

What is the difference between flipping and rotating an APNG?

A flip is a mirror: asymmetric shapes and any text in the image reverse, and repeating the same flip undoes it. A rotation is a turn: nothing mirrors, text stays readable in the new orientation, and a 90-degree step swaps the image's width and height. If you are trying to fix a sideways picture you want Rotate APNG; if you are trying to make a character face the other way, flipping is correct.

Does the file picker accept .apng, or do I have to rename it to .png?

.apng is accepted as-is — the file input on this page is not restricted by extension, so the file shows up in the normal open dialog. No rename is needed either way, since an APNG is a PNG with extra chunks and the decoder reads the base image regardless of what the file is called.

Which viewers will still animate an APNG after I convert one?

APNG animates natively in Chrome 59+, Edge 79+, Firefox 3+, Safari 8+ (desktop and iOS), Opera 46+ and Samsung Internet 7.2+ — roughly 96% of global browsers according to caniuse. Where it is not supported, such as Internet Explorer or Opera Mini, the first frame renders as an ordinary static PNG, so the image never appears broken.

Is APNG an actual standard or a Mozilla extension?

It is a standard now. APNG started life as an unofficial extension drafted by Mozilla engineers (the APNG 1.0 specification on the Mozilla wiki is credited to Stuart Parmenter, Vladimir Vukicevic and Andrew Smith), and for years it lived outside the PNG spec proper. That changed when the W3C published PNG Third Edition as a Recommendation on 24 June 2025: animation is now specified in the standard itself, with the acTL, fcTL and fdAT chunks defined in the spec text and image/apng registered as an Internet Media Type alongside image/png.

Does flipping change the pixel dimensions?

No. A mirror rearranges pixels without adding or removing any, so a 512x288 source saves out as 512x288. Only the Resize tab changes dimensions, and only a 90 or 270-degree step on the Rotate tab swaps width and height. If your saved file has different dimensions than you expected, something in the Crop or Resize tab was applied to the same working image before you hit Save — click Reset in that tab and flip again.