Mirror an APNG horizontally or vertically. The first frame is saved as a still PNG — the animation is not kept.
This page opens the xconvert Photo Editor on its Flip tab. Under Mirror, two buttons, Horizontal and Vertical, mirror the loaded picture across the corresponding axis; the Save as list and the Download button write the result out. It is a one-frame editor — it works on the first frame of the file you hand it, and "Save as" offers "Same as original" (which saves an edited APNG as a still PNG) plus JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, TIFF, ICO, AVIF, PSD and PPM, with no APNG entry. An animated .apng therefore comes back as a mirrored still image, not a mirrored loop; the editor says so when the file opens. Downloaded without an edit, the file is your original, animation intact.
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.
| Operation | What moves | Reversible by | Text in the image |
|---|---|---|---|
| Horizontal flip | Columns mirror across the vertical centre line | Clicking "Horizontal" again | Becomes mirror-writing |
| Vertical flip | Rows mirror across the horizontal centre line | Clicking "Vertical" again | Becomes upside-down mirror-writing |
| Both flips | Every pixel maps to its diagonal opposite | Applying both again | Reads upside down, not mirrored |
| Rotate 180 | Identical pixel mapping to "both flips" | Two more 90-degree steps | Reads upside down, not mirrored |
| Rotate 90 | Rows become columns; W and H swap | Three more 90-degree steps | Reads sideways |
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 happens to a frame with a transparent background in the main "Save as" choices:
| Save as | Alpha channel | Encoding |
|---|---|---|
| PNG ("Same as original" for an APNG) | Preserved | Lossless |
| TIFF | Preserved (RGBA) | Lossless (Deflate) |
| WebP | Preserved | Lossy, even at Quality 100 |
| AVIF | Preserved | Lossy |
| GIF | On/off only — soft edges and shadows become hard-edged | 256-colour palette |
| BMP | Discarded — flattened onto white (24-bit) | Uncompressed |
| JPG | Discarded — transparent pixels become white; the editor offers "Keep PNG" | Lossy |
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 has 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. Files there are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically afterward — 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.
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.
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, WebP and AVIF re-encode with quantisation, so a flip-and-save round trip through any of those does soften the picture even though the geometry is exact.
You saved as JPG (or BMP or PPM). Those formats have no transparency, so the editor fills transparent areas with white and says so, with a "Keep PNG" button beside the note. Choose PNG (or WebP, AVIF or TIFF) in "Save as" instead to keep the transparent background.
Yes — drop up to 50 APNG files at once (a mixed batch works too). The flip direction you set applies to every file in the batch; "Download all (.zip)" saves every flipped result in one ZIP, or use "Download one by one" to save them separately.
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.
.apng, or do I have to rename it to .png?.apng is accepted as-is — the editor recognises the .apng extension, so no rename is needed. A renamed .png works too, since an APNG is a PNG with extra chunks and the decoder reads the first frame regardless of what the file is called.
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.
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.
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.