Rotate iPhone HEIC photos 90° left or right, or straighten them by a fine angle. The result is saved as JPG.
HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) has been 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. The catch with rotation is that most online "rotate image" tools only accept JPG, PNG, and GIF — they refuse HEIC outright, so the usual workflow is HEIC -> JPG -> rotate -> save (a double re-encode). Here the HEIC opens directly and the rotated photo is encoded once — as JPG, because a browser cannot write HEIC. Common reasons to rotate a HEIC directly:
| Angle | Source -> Result | Typical fix |
|---|---|---|
| 90 degrees CW | Sideways with subject's head on the left -> upright | iPhone held in portrait, EXIF Orientation 6 ignored on the recipient device |
| 90 degrees CCW | Sideways with subject's head on the right -> upright | iPhone held in portrait the other way, EXIF Orientation 8 ignored |
| 180 degrees | Upside-down -> right-side-up | Inverted scan, document photographed from the wrong side |
For mirroring (left-right reversal) instead of rotation, use Flip HEIC. To change pixel dimensions without rotating, see Resize HEIC. If the recipient is on Windows or Android and can't open HEIC at all, HEIC to JPG or HEIC to PNG is the right tool.
| Setting | What it does | When to change it |
|---|---|---|
| "90° left" / "90° right" | Quarter turns, no resampling of the pixel grid | Sideways phone shots and scans |
| "Fine angle" (−45° to 45°) | Straightens a tilted horizon; "Background for exposed corners" fills or crops the corners | Crooked scans and horizons |
| "Save as" | "Same as original" (a HEIC is saved 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 rotate | 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 rotate itself moves pixels without loss, but the photo is encoded again when you download. A browser cannot write HEIC, so the photo is saved as JPG unless you pick another format, and the Download button names the format 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.
iPhones save the sensor pixels in landscape and write an EXIF Orientation tag (1-8) telling viewers how to display them. Photos.app, macOS Preview, and modern web browsers honor that tag and rotate on display. Windows File Explorer, the Photos app on older Windows builds, many email clients, slide decks, and printer drivers ignore EXIF and render the raw landscape pixels — which makes your portrait HEIC look sideways. Rotating the pixels here and rewriting EXIF Orientation to 1 (normal) makes the photo display correctly everywhere.
Yes — you don't need a separate conversion step first. 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 rotate -> JPG re-save). Here the HEIC opens directly and the rotated photo is encoded once. The result is not a HEIC, though: a browser cannot write HEIC, so it is saved as JPG ("HEIC can't be written in the browser, so this was saved as JPG"), or as PNG or another format you pick.
Yes, in the JPG the editor saves. The EXIF Orientation tag is reset to 1 (normal) because the pixels are now upright, and the rest of the metadata — capture timestamp, GPS coordinates, ISO / aperture / shutter, iPhone model, lens info — is copied across. Other "Save as" formats do not carry the EXIF. If you'd rather strip EXIF for privacy reasons, save as PNG or run the result through Compress HEIC which has metadata-removal options.
Yes. Use "Fine angle" in Rotate: drag it anywhere from −45° to 45° (0.1° steps), nudge it with the "−0.5°" / "+0.5°" buttons or type the angle — for example −2 to level a horizon that slopes up to the right. Combine it with "90° left" or "90° right" for larger turns. "Background for exposed corners" decides what fills the new corners: "Auto-crop corners" trims them away, or pick "White", "Black" or "Transparent" (transparent needs a format with alpha, such as PNG or WebP).
No. The rotation operates on the still image inside the HEIC container — the paired Live Photo .MOV video, depth maps from Portrait Mode, and Apple ProRAW HDR side data are stripped because they're separate tracks that don't have a meaningful "rotated" version. If keeping Live Photo motion matters, do the rotation in the Mac Photos app, which re-rotates the paired video alongside the still.
Yes — drop up to 50 HEIC 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.
Windows 11 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 rotated file from here is already a JPG (unless you picked another format), so it opens everywhere; choose PNG with "Save as" if you want lossless and don't mind a much larger file. For HEICs you have not rotated, HEIC to JPG and HEIC to PNG do the conversion alone. The rotation is kept in the output because the pixels (not just the EXIF tag) were rotated here.
Yes — see Rotate JPG, Rotate PNG, Rotate WebP, Rotate GIF, Rotate BMP, and Rotate TIFF for the same rotation controls applied to the equivalent formats.