Rotate HEIF

How to Rotate HEIF Images Online

1. Choose Your HEIF Files: Drag and drop HEIF images onto the page or click "Choose HEIF files" — up to 50 at once. The first photo opens in the editor and the rest line up as thumbnails below it; with two or more photos open, "Add more" adds files to the same batch.
2. Rotate It: In Rotate, click "90° left" or "90° right" for quarter turns, or drag "Fine angle" (−45° to 45°) to straighten a tilted horizon; "Background for exposed corners" picks "Auto-crop corners", "White", "Black" or "Transparent". The rotation applies to every photo in the batch.
3. Pick the Output Format (Optional): "Save as" keeps "Same as original" or saves as JPG, PNG, WebP or another format. For JPG, WebP and AVIF output, the "Quality" slider (40–100) trades file size against detail. Resize, Crop, Rotate and Flip all work in the same session, and "Undo" steps back.
4. Download: Click the Download button, which names the output format (for example "Download PNG"), for one photo, or "Download all (.zip)" for a batch — "Download one by one" saves the files separately. The editor opens HEIF files right in your browser whenever your browser can decode them, so those files are not uploaded. A file it can't decode is either processed on our servers and deleted automatically afterward — the editor says so before you download — or skipped with a note. No sign-up, no watermark.

Why Rotate HEIF Images?

HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format, ISO/IEC 23008-12) is the modern image container Apple adopted as the default iPhone format in iOS 11 / 2017 and Samsung uses on Galaxy phones. HEIF stores orientation as both an internal irot transformation property and an EXIF Orientation tag — and when those two disagree, different apps render the image differently. The cleanest fix is to bake rotation into the pixel data and clear the orientation tag so every viewer agrees. Common reasons to rotate:

• iPhone photo displays sideways after upload — Many web platforms strip or ignore EXIF orientation. A portrait shot taken with the phone held vertically lands sideways on Reddit, LinkedIn, eBay listings, or a CMS upload form. Baking the rotation in fixes it once and for all.
• Conflicting orientation tags after editing — HEIF supports both irot (HEIF spec) and EXIF Orientation. Some editors update one and not the other, producing files that look correct in Apple Preview but flipped in Chrome, Firefox, or Pillow-based pipelines. See libheif issue #227 for the canonical write-up.
• Selfies and front-camera shots flipped left-to-right — Use the flip tool for mirroring; rotate is for 90/180/270 reorientations.
• macOS Sonoma changed HEIF orientation behavior — macOS 14 stopped rotating HEIF based on the EXIF tag, so files that looked right in Big Sur or Monterey may now display wrong on a newer Mac. Rebaking the rotation makes the file render-independent.
• Print and document layout — A 4×6 print or a Word doc embed needs the photo physically upright; software that ignores orientation metadata produces sideways prints.
• Feeding HEIF into ML / OCR pipelines — Most image-processing libraries decode HEIF without applying orientation. Rotating in pixel space avoids passing wrongly-oriented frames into a model.

HEIF vs HEIC vs JPEG Orientation Handling

If a recipient can't open HEIF, convert HEIF to JPG — JPEG renders everywhere but is roughly twice the size at the same visible quality.

Rotation Angle Quick Guide

90°, 180°, and 270° rotations involve no interpolation, but the result is still re-encoded — as JPG, since a browser cannot write HEIF. Custom angles require interpolation, so re-rotating multiple times stacks small quality losses — do all rotation in one pass.

Frequently Asked Questions

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?

Only slightly. A browser cannot write HEIF, so every rotation is saved as a new image in the format the Download button names (usually JPG); 90°, 180° and 270° turns move pixels without resampling, and at the default "Quality" of 85 the re-encode loss is invisible to the eye. Save as PNG for a lossless copy of the rotated pixels. For custom angles (e.g., straightening a 3° tilt), the image is resampled (bilinear 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 — the editor outputs a single still image, JPG unless you pick another format (a browser cannot write 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 many HEIF files at once?

Yes — drop up to 50 HEIF 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.

Can I keep the rotated photo as HEIF, or does it become JPG?

It becomes JPG unless you pick another format: a browser cannot write HEIF, so the editor has no HEIF output. JPG opens for Android users on older OS, in legacy document formats, on platforms that reject HEIF and at printers that don't accept HEIF natively; pick PNG with "Save as" for a lossless copy. JPG is universal but ~2× larger than the HEIF; PNG is lossless but 3-5× larger. If your audience is all iPhone, iPad and modern Mac and the file must stay HEIF, rotate it in the Photos app instead. For HEIFs you are not rotating, HEIF to JPG and HEIF to PNG do the conversion alone.

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

Yes. Resize, Crop, Rotate and Flip are tabs of the same editor: open Resize to set a width, height, percent or "Size preset", or Crop for aspect-ratio chips and platform sizes, before you download, and the photo is encoded once. The HEIF cropper opens the same editor on its Crop tab. To shrink file size further after rotating, see the HEIF compressor.