Rotate PNG images online for free. Fix orientation of screenshots and design assets — transparency preserved.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics) was published as a W3C Recommendation in October 1996, became RFC 2083 in January 1997, and standardized as ISO/IEC 15948:2004; the Third Edition was published in June 2025. It is the dominant lossless raster format for screenshots, UI mockups, logos, icons, and any image with transparency. Unlike JPEG, PNG has no EXIF orientation tag in its core spec — a sideways PNG stays sideways until you rotate the actual pixel data.
| Property | PNG | JPEG | WebP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Native lossless rotation | Yes (DEFLATE is always lossless) | Only via lossless 8x8-block transpose at multiples of 90° | Yes for lossless WebP; lossy WebP recompresses |
| Transparency / alpha channel | Full 8-bit alpha (RGBA up to 64-bit) | Not supported | Full alpha in both lossy and lossless modes |
| EXIF orientation auto-rotate | Not in original PNG; eXIf chunk added in Third Edition (June 2025) | Yes — Orientation tag (1-8) widely respected | Yes — EXIF supported via metadata chunks |
| Custom-angle corner fill | Transparent | White or solid background | Transparent (lossless) / solid (lossy) |
| Color depth options | 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 bits per channel | 8 bits per channel | 8 bits per channel |
| Typical use case | Screenshots, logos, UI, line art | Photos | Web photos and graphics |
| Rotation type | Pixel quality | Output dimensions | Corner fill | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 90° / 270° | Pixel-perfect, lossless | Width and height swap | None (rectangle remains a rectangle) | Sideways phone screenshots, sprite-sheet axis fixes |
| 180° | Pixel-perfect, lossless | Unchanged | None | Upside-down scans, flipped game captures |
| Custom angle (e.g. 7°) | Bilinear resampling — minor edge softening | Bounding box grows to fit rotated rectangle (or shrinks with "Auto-crop corners") | Transparent by default; "White" or "Black" if you pick them | Straightening scanned docs, design adjustments |
No. Rotations of 90°, 180°, and 270° are pure pixel transposes — every original pixel ends up in a new (x, y) position with no resampling, no interpolation, and no color shift. For an 8-bit PNG the output is identical to the input, just reoriented (a 16-bit PNG is saved as 8-bit). Custom angles like 7° or 45° require resampling to fit the new pixel grid, which causes a small amount of edge softening — typically invisible at viewing size but measurable in a pixel-diff.
Yes. PNG's alpha channel is preserved bit-for-bit during rotation. For right-angle rotations the alpha map rotates with the color channels. For custom angles, the bounding box grows to contain the rotated rectangle and, with the default "Transparent" choice under "Background for exposed corners", the new corner pixels are fully transparent (alpha = 0) rather than white or any other solid color. PNG's RGBA truecolor and grayscale-with-alpha modes (see the W3C PNG specification) store those clear pixels exactly.
JPEG files from phones and cameras embed an EXIF Orientation tag (values 1-8) and viewers like Photos, Preview, Chrome, and Windows Photos read that tag and rotate the displayed pixels on the fly. PNG's original 1996 spec had no equivalent tag, so the on-disk pixels are the truth. The Third Edition PNG Recommendation (June 2025) adds an eXIf chunk for embedded EXIF including Orientation, but support across browsers and OS image viewers is still rolling out — most existing PNGs in the wild have no orientation metadata, so a real pixel rotation is the safe fix.
For 90° / 180° / 270° rotations, yes — pixels move, the DEFLATE compressor re-encodes, and the decoded output equals the original rotated array. PNG output has no "Quality" slider — it is always lossless, though a 16-bit PNG is saved as 8-bit. Otherwise visual loss only enters if you reduce resolution or convert to a lossy target like JPEG or WebP.
Yes, within ±45° per step. 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). Transparent corners are kept when you save as PNG.
PNG processes locally in your browser for this tool, with no upload step. Practical size limits depend on how much memory your browser tab can hold; a modern laptop comfortably handles screenshots, mockups, and scans up to several thousand pixels per side. For very large composites consider downscaling first via Resize PNG before rotating to keep memory use reasonable.
For 90° and 270° rotations, output size is usually within a few percent of the input — the same pixels are present, but DEFLATE's row-based filtering may compress slightly better or worse depending on whether the dominant gradients run horizontally or vertically. 180° rotations almost always land at near-identical size. Custom-angle rotations can grow by 10-30% because the bounding box expands and the new transparent corners add pixels (though transparent regions compress very well).
Yes — drop up to 50 PNG 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.
Yes — both pixel formats rotate identically. PNG-8 stores up to 256 colors via a PLTE palette chunk plus optional 1-bit or 256-entry tRNS transparency; PNG-24 stores 8-bit RGB; PNG-32 adds an 8-bit alpha channel for full RGBA. Right-angle rotations keep a palette image a palette PNG with the same colors (written with 8-bit palette indices). Custom-angle rotations blend edge pixels, which usually creates more than 256 colors, so the result is saved as a truecolor PNG (RGBA when it has transparency) — the saved file will be larger as a result.