How to Flip or Mirror an Image — and Fix Backwards Selfies for Good

Step by step

Why selfies come out backwards

When you use the front camera, the phone shows you a mirrored preview, because that is what you are used to seeing in a bathroom mirror. Raising your right hand moves the hand on the right of the screen, which feels natural. But a camera facing you actually sees you the other way round, the way other people see you.

Phones disagree about which version to save. Some save the photo as the camera saw it, so it suddenly looks "wrong" compared with the preview — and to you it does, because you are used to your mirror face. Others save it mirrored to match the preview, which looks right to you but puts every bit of writing in the photo backwards: the slogan on your T-shirt, a shop sign, the name on a book cover.

• iPhone: Settings → Camera → Mirror Front Camera. On, photos are saved as the preview showed them; off, as the camera saw them.
• Android: the setting varies by maker and is usually in the camera app's own settings, often named something like *Save selfies as previewed*.

For photos you have already taken, a horizontal flip fixes either case. If the writing is backwards, flip it. If the writing reads correctly but your face looks strange to you, that is the version everyone else sees — flipping it will look better to you and worse to everyone who knows you.

Flipping is not rotating

A rotation turns the whole picture around its centre. Writing in a rotated photo is still readable; you just have to tilt your head. A flip mirrors the picture, and writing in it is backwards however you hold it. No rotation, at any angle, can produce a single-axis mirror.

The one overlap: flipping both horizontally and vertically gives exactly the same result as rotating 180°. So Both is the fix for a page that went through the scanner upside down, and it reads normally afterwards. For a photo lying on its side, use a 90° rotation instead. The same distinction applies to video: rotating a video fixes sideways clips, while the video flip tool mirrors one.

When mirroring a photo is a mistake

Designers flip photos all the time so a subject faces into a layout rather than off the edge of the page. It is a good trick — with some traps:

• Text. Signs, logos, number plates and clothing prints become backwards. Check every corner.
• Faces. Nobody's face is perfectly symmetrical. A mirrored portrait of someone well known looks subtly off to people who know them, even if they cannot say why.
• Real places. A mirrored street, skyline or landmark is simply wrong to anyone who has been there, and in news or documentary use it misrepresents the scene.
• Details that have a side. Wedding rings, watches, shirt buttons, the steering wheel of a car, the side people drive on — all swap.
• Product photos. A mirrored product image can show a logo or control layout that does not exist.

If you need the subject to face the other way and the photo contains text, flip the photo and then cover or crop out the text, or choose a different photo.

Does flipping reduce quality?

The flip itself loses nothing: every pixel moves to its mirrored position and no pixel is changed or discarded, so the dimensions and sharpness stay identical. Any change in quality comes from saving the file. Saving as PNG is lossless. Saving as JPEG or WebP compresses the image again, and at a high quality setting the difference is invisible.

Transparency survives a flip as long as you save to a format that supports it. A logo on a transparent background flipped and saved as PNG or WebP stays transparent; saved as JPEG, the transparent areas are filled with white. The PNG vs JPG vs WebP guide covers which format to pick.

Flipping many images at once

The free plan flips one image at a time, up to 25 MB. With Pro you can add a whole set and apply the same flip to all of them, then download them as one ZIP — useful for a stack of pages that went through a scanner the wrong way, or a folder of mirrored selfies from one phone.

After flipping, you may want to crop to a particular aspect ratio for the place you are posting, or add a caption in the meme generator, which also has its own flip control for quick fixes.