Flip iPhone HEIC photos horizontally (mirror selfies) or vertically. Correct front-camera mirroring so text reads correctly.
HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) is the default photo format on every iPhone since the iPhone 7 / iOS 11 (2017) and on Mac since macOS High Sierra. It packs roughly half the file size of an equivalent JPEG at the same visual quality, which is why your iPhone Photos library is full of .heic files. Most online "rotate" tools simply refuse HEIC — they're built for JPG, PNG, and GIF only. Common reasons to flip a HEIC specifically:
| Operation | What it does | Result of doing it twice | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Horizontal flip (mirror) | Reflects across the vertical axis (left ↔ right) | Returns to original | Selfies, gaze direction, RTL layouts |
| Vertical flip | Reflects across the horizontal axis (top ↔ bottom) | Returns to original | Inverted scans, reflection effects |
| Rotate 90° / 270° | Turns image a quarter turn | Returns at 180° (still wrong) | Portrait ↔ landscape orientation fix |
| Rotate 180° | Turns image upside down | Returns to original | Same visual as H-flip + V-flip combined |
| Convert HEIC → JPG | Re-encodes pixels in a different format | n/a (one-way) | Sharing with non-Apple devices |
If you need rotation instead of flipping, use Rotate HEIC. To change pixel dimensions without flipping, see Resize HEIC. If the goal is sharing with a non-Apple device, HEIC to JPG or HEIC to PNG is the right tool.
| Setting | What it does | When to change it |
|---|---|---|
| "Horizontal" / "Vertical" | Mirrors the photo left-right or top-bottom; click again to undo | Selfie text, a logo facing the wrong way, an upside-down scan |
| "Save as" | "Same as original" (saves a HEIC as JPG), or JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, TIFF, ICO, AVIF, PSD, PPM | The destination needs another format |
| "Quality" (40–100, starts at 85) | Re-encode quality for JPG, WebP and AVIF output | Lower for smaller files, higher before more editing |
| Resize (same session) | Changes the pixel size along with the flip | Downscale for the web in one pass |
The editor has no DPI, bit-depth, compression-type or file-size-target setting. To hit a byte budget, run the result through Compress HEIC.
Only through the re-encode. The flip itself moves pixels without loss, but the photo is encoded again when you download. A browser cannot write HEIC, so the Download button names the format you get (usually JPG) before you save; at the default "Quality" of 85 the loss is invisible to the eye, and raising "Quality" toward 100 narrows it further. If you plan several edits, do them all in one session — Resize, Crop, Rotate and Flip work together — so the photo is encoded only once.
Apple shows the front camera preview mirrored so framing feels natural ("if I move my hand left, my reflection moves left"), but the saved file is un-mirrored — which is why text on your shirt reads correctly in the photo but feels off compared to the viewfinder. A horizontal flip recreates that mirrored preview, which is what most people actually want when posting to Instagram, TikTok, or BeReal.
No. The flip operates on the still image inside the HEIC container — Live Photo paired video, depth maps, and Portrait Mode bokeh data are stripped because they're separate tracks that don't have a meaningful "flipped" version. If you need the Live Photo motion preserved, do the flip on the Mac Photos app, which re-flips the paired .MOV alongside the still.
You don't need a separate conversion step — the editor opens HEIC directly. It cannot keep the HEIC container, though: a browser can't write HEIC, so the flipped photo is saved as JPG (the editor says so), or as PNG or another format you pick in "Save as". Most online "rotate image" tools list only JPG / PNG / GIF as supported inputs and force you to convert HEIC first, which means a double re-encode (HEIC → JPG, then flip → JPG re-save); here the photo is encoded once.
It can. HEIC files store an EXIF orientation flag, and viewers like macOS Preview and Photos honor it — so a photo that looks "right side up" on a Mac may show as rotated on Windows or Android because they ignore the tag. The editor makes the pixels upright when it opens the photo, applies the flip to the actual pixel data, and saves the JPG with the Orientation tag reset to normal (camera, date taken and GPS are kept), so the result reads the same everywhere. If the photo still looks sideways in the editor, use Rotate — a flip mirrors, it does not turn.
Yes — drop up to 50 HEIC 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.
Technically yes — but the rendered text in the output will be mirror-readable (backwards). HEIC flipping operates on pixels, not glyphs, so any text inside an iPhone screenshot will be reversed left-to-right (horizontal flip) or upside down (vertical flip). If you want the image flipped while text stays readable, that's a manual edit in Photos / Photoshop / Photopea where you flip the background layer and re-render the text on top.
Windows 10 needs the HEIF Image Extension from the Microsoft Store, older Android versions can't open HEIC at all, and many web platforms still reject .heic uploads. The flipped file is already a JPG (unless you picked another format), which opens everywhere; pick PNG in "Save as" if you want lossless and don't mind a much larger file. To convert without flipping, use HEIC to JPG or HEIC to PNG.
Yes — see Flip JPG, Flip PNG, Flip GIF, Flip WebP, Flip BMP, and Flip TIFF for the same flip controls applied to the equivalent formats.