How To Rotate and Flip Photos On An iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can rotate and flip photos on your iPhone.

Now a common question that iPhone users have is how you rotate or flip a photo. So how you do that depends on where the photo is. Let's start off in the Photos App and say your photo is there. In that case it is relatively simple. If you have a photo like this one you can just go to that photo, like that, and now to rotate it is pretty easy. You want to go down to the bottom, to the controls here, and tap. This allows you to adjust the photo. Now both the abilities to rotate and to flip the photo are in the Crop Tools. So you want to tap Crop at the bottom. Now, if you look at the tools here at the upper left you'll see the Flip Tool is first. Tap that and you can see that you can flip the photo. Now if you want to rotate you have two different tools that you can use depending on how much you want to rotate. This tool here will rotate 90 degrees to the left. You can just keep going. Four times takes you right back to where you want it. If you want to rotate to the right just use that three times and you get the equivalent. But if you want to rotate a smaller amount than 90 degrees then you want to go down here and you have various tools here. Make sure the first one is selected. That's the Straighten Tool. Straightening and rotating are the same thing. So if you have the Straighten Tool turned On you have this control here that you can grab and drag to the left or to the right. Notice when you do so the photo will get larger or smaller to make sure that the cropping, when you rotate, will not break the border of the photo. So, you can see how the corner there matches with the corner of the rectangle. Now you've rotated it. You tap Done and you're finished. The photo is now rotated in your Photos collection and if you go back to view it or share it you will have this rotated version of the photo. 

Note that the Photos App always does edit non-destructively. Meaning that you can get it back to the original at any time. So, with this selected I will go back to the editing tools like this and you can see there's a Revert button there. I can revert back to the original any time I want. So if I want to rotate it temporarily, export it, or share it I can and then go back to have my original shown in my Photos App. 

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So rotating and flipping in Photos is pretty straight forward. But what if the image is not in Photos. What if it is in File? So I'm going to go into the Files App here and I've got a folder called Images. Let's say I want to rotate one of these. So let's go to this one here. You can employ many different strategies to do this. It turns out one of the easiest ones is to actually import it into Photos and export it back out. It doesn't really take that many steps. So I'm going to tap down here below the photo to reveal all of the different buttons. Then I'm going to use the Share Button here and I'm going to go down to Save Image. There are actually two very similar looking commands here. Save Image and Save to Files. Save Image is the one we want. It makes a copy of the image and puts it in your Photos Library. So I'll use that. Now I'll go back to the Home Screen and then back into Photos. I can now search for the photo or look under Recents here and find that photo that is new in my Photos Library. I can now go to the Adjustment Tools here and I can choose Crop and I can rotate it as I like. 

I like doing it in Photos because you have this nice grid here that helps you align the horizon if that is your intention. Then I can tap Done. The image has been rotated. I can now tap Share and I see the same list of options here. But this time I want to look for the one called Saved to Files. This will save a copy back to my Files App. So I'll go back in Images here and here's where the original one was. I'll tap Save and now when I go back to Files I will see in the list here the original, which was picture 7, but also this new version of it here where I can see it has been rotated. Back in the Photos App I can simply Delete this from my Library here since I don't really need it there. I just wanted it to be a file. 

Of course it is easy to Flip the photos that way as well. But note that if you just want to rotate the photo 90 degrees you can actually do it in the Files App. Tap and Hold here and it will bring up a Menu. Go to Quick Actions and you've got Rotate Right and Rotate Left. So you can use those to easily rotate it 90 degrees without having to go to any other app at all. 

Another thing you can do is use a third party image editing app. There are tons of them. I'll demonstrate with Pixelmator which is now owned by Apple. I'm going to go to this picture here and tap and hold. I'm going to Copy it. There are many ways to get the image into Pixelmator. I'll just copy it, like that, and when I open it up here it knows there's an image in the Clipboard. I can allow the Paste and have it in there. I can also tap here and then open up the file. So, I can go now to this image here in Pixelmator and, as you can imagine, an app like Pixelmator now has the ability to rotate an image. I can tap the Paintbrush Tool there. I can scroll down to Crop Tools and in the Crop Tools I can crop it like normally, I can also use two-fingers and rotate the image like that and then Apply. Now, I can tap the Share button there and export it and choose the format. I'll choose JPEG, quality and original and Next and then I can choose where to Save it. In this case, of course, I want not to save the image to the Photos App but to Save to Files. I can save it as yet another copy of this. Here you can see I've got the second one in there rotated slightly differently than what I did before.

Other apps may do it in different ways and may have more tools. Like for instance a Flip Tool as well. 

Now if you really are determined to do this without any third party app and you don't want to use the Photos App, there is a trick where you can do it just in the Files App. So, I'm going to Tap and Hold the picture until I get the Menu. I'm going to Copy it. Now I'm going to go into the picture, like this, and I need to paste it in here. Now if you Tap and Hold sometimes you'll get a Menu there that says Copy Subject and other a few other things including Paste. But since there is no subject here it won't do that. So instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to tap on the Markup Tools at the bottom. I'm going to tap the Plus button there, add a Shape, and I'm going to add just any shape. A circle. Now that I've added a circle I've got this Menu here with the three dots. I'm going to tap that and choose Paste. I'm going to allow the paste and it is going to paste in that image. I'm going to move it aside and select the circle here and then delete it. Now I'm going to tap to select this and I'm going to enlarge it quite a bit by dragging the dots. I need to enlarge it a lot because when I rotate it I need to fill the space. So with it  enlarged like that I'm going to use two fingers and rotate it. It's kind of tricky to do it. It might take a few attempts to try to get it to rotate with two fingers. But once you do you can rotate it and then drag it into position. Make sure that the corners here don't have any extra bleed through of the image underneath it and now you're done. 

But there's an issue. If you go back to the picture here and then you go back to the Markup Tools you'll notice that you still have two layers here. Like that. It's probably not what you want. So what you want to do here is, back here in Files, you want to tap and hold and then select under Quick Actions the Convert Image function. Then choose a format. I'll choose JPEG. I'll make it original size. I will Export a version of that. You can see here that this size is much smaller than this size because this one now contains two layers of the same image. 

So there are a few different methods for how to rotate an image that starts off as a file. For practical use probably the best way to do it is just to bring it into the Photos App even if you just do it to export it back out and then remove it from the Photos afterwards. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.