Why does my HEIF look upright on iPhone but sideways everywhere else?

Apple's Photos and Preview apps read both the irot HEIF property and the EXIF Orientation tag, and they apply the rotation visually before display. Many other viewers (Chrome's HEIF preview, libheif-based pipelines, older versions of Pillow) only read one or the other — or read both and apply both, resulting in double-rotation. Rotating with XConvert bakes the orientation into the pixel data and resets the EXIF Orientation tag to 1, so every viewer renders the image the same way.

Will rotating my HEIF re-encode it and lose quality?

For 90°, 180°, and 270° rotations, no — the HEVC blocks are transposed without resampling, so the output is mathematically identical in quality to the input. For custom angles (e.g., straightening a 3° tilt), the image is resampled with bicubic interpolation and re-encoded, which is visually lossless at default quality but technically a re-encode. If you'll rotate multiple times (e.g., crop, then rotate, then crop again), do everything in one session to avoid stacking losses.

Does rotation preserve Live Photos, depth maps, and burst data?

The still image is rotated and re-saved. Live Photo motion clips (the paired.MOV) and depth/Portrait data are stored as separate streams and are NOT preserved on download — XConvert outputs a single still HEIF. If you need those auxiliary streams intact, edit the photo in iOS Photos directly (which keeps Live Photo and depth) and let it bake the rotation on export.

My iPhone HEIF was already correctly rotated when I took it — why does it show sideways now?

Several possibilities: (1) a service stripped EXIF metadata during upload (Reddit, Discord, many web forms strip EXIF for privacy); (2) the file went through a converter that copied EXIF Orientation but didn't apply the irot transformation, causing one or the other to be ignored; (3) you opened it on macOS Sonoma 14+, which changed how HEIF orientation is interpreted from earlier macOS versions. The fix is the same: rebake the rotation into the pixel data.

Can I rotate Samsung Galaxy HEIF photos the same way as iPhone HEIF?

Yes. Samsung Galaxy phones write HEIF using the same ISO/IEC 23008-12 container as iPhone HEIC (they're the same standard, different vendor extensions). XConvert handles both. The orientation conflict is identical because both Apple and Samsung write irot and EXIF Orientation tags into the same file.

How does rotating HEIF compare to rotating HEIC?

HEIC is Apple's brand name for HEIF using HEVC compression — same container, same rotation mechanics. If your file extension is .heic, use the HEIC rotation tool for clarity; if it's .heif or .heifs, use this page. The actual rotation operation and output are equivalent.

Can I batch rotate hundreds of HEIF files at once?

Yes — there's no quantity limit. Drop in an entire iPhone camera roll export. Apply the same rotation to all uploads, or set a different angle per file from the file list. Files process in parallel and download as a single ZIP.

Should I rotate HEIF and keep it as HEIF, or rotate and convert to JPG?

Keep HEIF if your audience uses iPhone, iPad, modern Mac (Big Sur+), Windows 10+ with the HEIF extension installed, or Safari 17+. Convert to JPG or PNG if you're sharing with Android users on older OS, embedding in legacy document formats, posting to platforms that reject HEIF, or sending to printers that don't accept HEIF natively. JPG is universal but ~2× larger; PNG is lossless but 3-5× larger.

Can I crop or resize at the same time as rotating?

Yes. Under "Image Resolution," scale by percentage or keep the original dimensions. For dedicated cropping with handles and aspect-ratio presets, use the HEIF cropper instead — it gives finer control than the percentage-scale here. To shrink file size further after rotating, see the HEIF compressor.

Rotate HEIF

Rotate HEIF images online for free. Fix sideways iPhone and Samsung photos with compression and resize control.

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