Rotate an APNG to fix its orientation. The first frame is saved as a still PNG — the animation is not kept.
This page opens the xconvert Photo Editor on its Rotate tab. Rotate has "90° left" and "90° right" for quarter turns plus a "Fine angle" slider (−45° to 45°) for straightening.
It is a single-frame editor. An animated APNG is detected when it opens, with a note that an edit keeps only the first frame. "Save as" has no APNG option: "Same as original" saves an edited APNG as a still PNG ("Only the first frame is kept (animated APNG)."), and the other choices are JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, TIFF, ICO, AVIF, PSD and PPM. An animated .apng therefore comes back as a rotated still (downloaded without an edit, the file is your original, animation intact; any turn saves a still PNG, because the editor cannot write APNG). A static .apng, which is what a single-image APNG conversion actually produces (a plain PNG with no animation chunks), rotates and saves back as PNG, which is lossless. If your file is genuinely animated, the section below points to the route that keeps the loop.
| Turn | Pixel operation | Width x Height | Resampling |
|---|---|---|---|
| 90 clockwise | Rows become columns | Swapped — a 640x480 becomes 480x640 | None |
| 90 counter-clockwise | Rows become columns the other way | Swapped | None |
| 180 (two clicks) | Every pixel maps to its diagonal opposite | Unchanged | None |
| 270 (three clicks) | Same as one click in the opposite direction | Swapped | None |
| "Fine angle" (−45° to 45°) | Frame turned off-axis; exposed corners filled or trimmed | Grows to fit, or shrinks with "Auto-crop corners" | Interpolated (resampled) |
The quarter turns are 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. "Fine angle" is a different operation: an off-axis rotation resamples the whole frame and exposes corner triangles, which "Background for exposed corners" fills ("Transparent", "White" or "Black") or trims away ("Auto-crop corners").
What each "Save as" choice does with a rotated frame that has a transparent background:
| Save as | Alpha channel | Encoding | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| PNG | Preserved (RGBA) | Lossless DEFLATE | The usual choice for a static APNG |
| TIFF | Preserved (RGBA) | Lossless Deflate | Larger than PNG |
| BMP | Not kept — flattened onto white (24-bit) | Uncompressed | The editor says the background will be white |
| WebP | Preserved | Always lossy, even at "Quality" 100 | Small, but not a lossless copy |
| GIF | 1-bit only — soft edges become hard-edged | One frame, 256-colour palette | Still image |
| JPG | Not kept — transparent regions become white | Lossy | A "Keep PNG" button switches back |
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. Files there are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically afterward — 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.
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. The editor says so when the file opens. Downloaded without an edit, the file is your original with its animation; any turn saves a still PNG, because the editor cannot write APNG. For an animated turn, use Compress APNG and the Rotate button on the file card.
Yes, up to 45 degrees either way. Drag "Fine angle" (−45° to 45°), use the "−0.5°" / "+0.5°" buttons, or type the angle — 7 works — and combine it with "90° left" or "90° right" for larger turns. An off-axis rotation resamples every pixel and exposes triangles in the corners, which "Background for exposed corners" fills ("Transparent", "White" or "Black") or trims ("Auto-crop corners"); a 90-degree step just relabels coordinates.
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.
You most likely saved as JPG, BMP or PPM. None of them has transparency, so the editor flattens the background onto white and says so before you download, with a "Keep PNG" button to switch back. WebP, AVIF, TIFF and PNG keep the alpha channel; GIF keeps only 1-bit transparency, so soft edges turn hard. Redo the rotation and save as PNG.
No, that is what a quarter turn does. A 640x480 image becomes 480x640 after one click of "90° left" or "90° 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.
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.
Yes — drop up to 50 APNG files at once (a mixed batch works too). The rotation angle you set applies to every file in the batch; "Download all (.zip)" saves every rotated result in one ZIP, or use "Download one by one" to save them separately.
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 rotate, switch to the Crop tab, and the selection grips will follow the new frame shape.
A rotated APNG saved here is a still PNG, so it shows wherever PNG does but does not play. An APNG rotated with Compress APNG stays animated, and 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.