Is flipping a TIFF actually lossless?

The flip itself is purely geometric — it reorders pixel rows or columns without recomputing any color values. Whether the saved file is bit-identical to a "flipped original" depends on the output compression. Keep LZW, Deflate, Packbits, CCITT, ZSTD, or None and you get true lossless output. Pick JPEG or lossy JP2K and the re-encode step introduces DCT/wavelet quantisation artefacts — the flip is still mathematically lossless but the codec is not.

Should I pick LZW or Deflate for the output?

For 8-bit RGB or grayscale TIFFs the two are close — LZW is faster to encode and Deflate is usually a few percent smaller. For 16-bit TIFFs (raw scans, medical, fine-art), Deflate is the better choice; LZW can occasionally produce a larger file than the source on high-bit-depth data because its dictionary-based scheme struggles with the noisy low-order bits.

Why are there two extensions.tif and.tiff?

They are the same format. ".tif" is the 3-character DOS/Windows-95 convention; ".tiff" is the full name preferred on Mac OS and Linux. Picking either under File Extension writes the same TIFF 6.0 byte structure — your downstream tool will accept both interchangeably.

Will flipping change my TIFF's EXIF or GPS metadata?

The pixel data is flipped and the TIFF container is rewritten, which means private EXIF tags, IPTC blocks, ICC profiles, and GeoTIFF georeference tags may not survive the round-trip. For archival or GIS work where metadata matters, keep an original copy. If you need the GeoTIFF tags re-written to match the new orientation, use a tool like GDAL after flipping.

Does flipping reverse text that appears in the image?

Yes — that is the whole point. A horizontal flip mirrors any visible text so it reads right-to-left. That is the desired behaviour for prepress and transfer printing; if you only want to correct a scanner's mirrored output, double-check that the source actually was mirrored and not just oriented differently.

Can I flip a multi-page TIFF (fax, multi-image scan)?

This tool processes the first image in a multi-page TIFF. For multi-page documents — fax archives, multi-frame scans, microscopy z-stacks — split the file into single-page TIFFs first, flip each, and recombine. Tools like ImageMagick (magick mogrify -flip *.tif) handle this in batch on the desktop.

What is the largest TIFF I can flip in the browser?

TIFF can store up to 4 GiB per file under the classic TIFF 6.0 spec, and BigTIFF extends this to effectively unlimited sizes. Browser memory is the practical constraint — flipping a 200 MP, 16-bit RGB TIFF (around 1.2 GB uncompressed) needs roughly twice that in RAM during processing. If your file is enormous, run a desktop tool instead.

Can I flip a 1-bit black-and-white TIFF without expanding it to grayscale?

Yes. Keep Compression Type set to CCITT Fax 4 (or CCITT Group 3) and the bit depth stays at 1. The flip is performed on the bitonal raster and the file is re-encoded under the same fax-compression scheme. Switching the compression to LZW or Deflate would re-encode as multi-bit and inflate the file size.

Need to rotate, compress, or convert instead?

If you need a 90° rotation rather than a mirror, see Rotate TIF. To shrink the file after flipping, use Compress TIF. To export the flipped result for web sharing, TIFF to JPG is the common next step, and TIF to PDF is useful for archiving multi-page scans.

Flip TIF Images

Flip TIF images horizontally or vertically with 10 compression type options including LZW, Deflate, ZSTD, and JPEG.

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