Flip an image verticallyFlip your photo upside down
Top becomes bottom, like a reflection in a lake. It is not the same as rotating, and you can see why.
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Top becomes bottom. The columns read out backwards and the rows stay as they were, which is what makes this different from turning the picture over.
The other axis
What the operation does
A vertical reflection is a scale of minus one on y with a translation of the frame height. Every column is read from the bottom up; every row keeps the order it had. It is the same class of operation as the horizontal case and it costs exactly as little, but people reach for it far less often, and when they do it is usually for a reason that has nothing to do with photographs.
The interesting property is what it does to text. A horizontally reflected word is unreadable because the letters are in the wrong order. A vertically reflected word is unreadable because each letter is upside down while the order is preserved — the eye can still parse the shape of the line, which is why a vertical reflection of a document looks wrong in a subtler and more disorienting way than a horizontal one.
Three steps
Running it
- Open the file. This page starts on the vertical axis, so the right-hand panel already shows the reflection when the file lands.
- Compare deliberately. The divider wipes across the frame rather than down it, which is the awkward direction for this axis. Holding Space to see the whole original is usually the faster check here.
- Save it. Container, then Save mirrored file. Nothing between the panel and the file changes except resolution.
What survives
Formats in, formats out
Reading covers JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP, TIFF and ICO wherever the browser will decode them, with HEIC handled by a WebAssembly codec that is only fetched when one is opened. Writing covers JPEG, PNG and WebP, because those are the three a browser can produce. Metadata other than the orientation flag is carried into JPEG and PNG exports; a WebP export is written clean.
- This is not the operation that puts a picture the right way up. If a photograph arrived upside down, both axes are wrong, and the fix is a turn rather than a reflection. Use the Turn control or the orientation grid in the same workspace (R turns a quarter step; the 180° turn puts an upside-down photograph right). Turning by an arbitrary angle is not offered.
- A reflected scene is no longer evidence of anything. The vertical case is less obvious than the horizontal one and therefore easier to miss. Shadows fall upwards, water sits above the shoreline, and light that came from a window now comes from the floor. Nothing on this page detects that; you have to.
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