Rotate APNG Online

Turn an APNG 90 Degrees at a Time

This page opens the xconvert Photo Editor on its Rotate tab. There are exactly two controls — Rotate Left and Rotate Right — and each click steps the working image by 90 degrees, so four clicks in one direction returns you to where you started. There is no arbitrary-angle field and no straighten slider.

It is a single-frame editor. It decodes one frame of the file you give it, and the Save dropdown writes JPG, PNG, WebP, TIFF or BMP — APNG is not on that list. An animated .apng therefore comes back as a rotated still. A static .apng, which is what a single-image APNG conversion actually produces (a plain PNG with no animation chunks), rotates and saves back through PNG with nothing lost. If your file is genuinely animated, the section below points to the route that keeps the loop.

How to Rotate an APNG

1. Select Your APNG: Click Select Image and pick the .apng or .png from your computer. The open dialog is not extension-filtered, so .apng shows up like any other image. Only the first file you pick is loaded, even if you multi-select.
2. Step It Around: Click Rotate Right for a clockwise 90-degree turn or Rotate Left for counter-clockwise. Two clicks in either direction gives you 180 degrees, which is the fix for an upside-down capture.
3. Stack Another Edit (Optional): The Crop, Flip and Resize tabs work on the same in-progress image, so you can straighten first and then trim or scale without re-loading anything.
4. Save the Result: Open the Save dropdown and choose your output. Pick PNG if the artwork has transparency — it is the only compact lossless option here that carries the alpha channel through.

What a 90-Degree Step Actually Does

Every step this page can perform is a pure coordinate remap: no pixel is blended with its neighbour, so the geometry is exact and the only quality question is which format you save to. That is also why there is no "straighten by 3 degrees" control here — an off-axis rotation would have to resample the whole frame and invent transparent corner triangles, which is a different operation from what these two buttons do.

What Each Save Format Keeps

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

Rotating the Whole Animation Instead

If the file is a real multi-frame APNG and the turn has to apply to all of it, use Compress APNG. It is server-side, and every uploaded file gets a card with its own Rotate, Flip Horizontal and Flip Vertical buttons; the orientation you set there is applied during a full re-extract-and-reassemble pass, so the frame sequence, the per-frame timing and the alpha channel survive the turn. Processing happens locally in your browser — no sign-up, no watermark.

Where APNG itself is negotiable, APNG to GIF keeps the motion at 256 colours per frame with on/off transparency, and APNG to MP4 keeps the motion with much better compression but no transparency, since mainstream video containers do not carry an alpha channel.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does rotating here keep the APNG animated?

No. We checked with a purpose-built 3-frame APNG (200x120, a differently placed coloured circle in each frame). After the picture was drawn into the editor's canvas and saved back out as PNG, only frame 1's circle was present, and the saved file's chunk list was IHDR, IDAT, IEND and nothing else — no acTL chunk, so it is a static PNG. For an animated turn, use Compress APNG and the Rotate button on the file card.

Can I rotate by an arbitrary angle, like 7 degrees?

Not on this page. The Rotate tab exposes two buttons that step 90 degrees at a time; there is no angle field. That constraint is also what keeps the operation exact — an off-axis rotation would resample every pixel and leave transparent triangles in the corners, whereas a 90-degree step just relabels coordinates.

Is a 90-degree turn lossless?

The geometry is: no interpolation happens, so the rotated frame contains the same pixel values as the source, just at transposed coordinates. Whether the file is lossless depends on your Save choice. PNG and TIFF preserve those values exactly; JPG and WebP re-quantise the image on the way out, so the turn is exact but the encode is not.

Why did my rotated image lose its transparent background?

You saved as JPG or WebP. Both drop the alpha channel here — JPG has no concept of transparency at all, and the WebP encoder on this page emits a bare lossy VP8 bitstream with no ALPH chunk. Because the pixels under a transparent region are stored as black, that is what appears once the channel is gone. Redo the rotation and save as PNG.

The rotated file came out with the width and height swapped — is that a bug?

No, that is what a quarter turn does. A 640x480 image becomes 480x640 after one click of Rotate Left or Rotate Right, because rows and columns exchange roles. Only the 180-degree case (two clicks) leaves the dimensions unchanged. If you need a specific final size, switch to the Resize tab after rotating.

My photo shows sideways in one app and upright in another — will rotating here fix it?

Probably, and for a reason worth knowing: some pictures are stored one way and displayed another because of an EXIF orientation flag, which older viewers ignore. Once you rotate and save from this page, the pixels themselves are in the new orientation, so every viewer agrees. Note that PNG and APNG rarely carry an orientation flag the way camera JPEGs do, so a sideways .apng is usually sideways in its pixel data rather than merely mis-flagged.

Can I rotate several APNGs at once?

Not here — this editor holds one image and returns one file. Compress APNG takes a batch in a single session, and each file card in that queue has its own Rotate control, so you can turn different files by different amounts in one pass.

Should I rotate before or after cropping?

Rotate first if the source is sideways, because you will be drawing the crop box against the orientation you actually want to keep. Both tabs act on the same working image, so Apply the rotation, switch to the Crop tab, and the selection grips will follow the new frame shape.

Will a rotated APNG still play everywhere the original did?

Yes — orientation has no bearing on decoder support. APNG animates natively in Chrome 59+, Edge 79+, Firefox 3+, Safari 8+ (desktop and iOS), Opera 46+ and Samsung Internet 7.2+, about 96% of global browsers according to caniuse, and viewers without support show the first frame as a static PNG. APNG is also part of the formal standard now: the W3C published PNG Third Edition as a Recommendation on 24 June 2025, defining the acTL, fcTL and fdAT chunks and registering the image/apng media type.