You hold the phone upright and take a photo. On the phone it looks upright. You upload it to a forum, an application form, a print shop — and it is lying on its side. Nothing is broken. The file has an argument in it that two pieces of software are settling differently.
What actually happened
A phone camera doesn't rotate the image when you rotate the phone. The sensor writes its rows the same way every time, and the phone records how it was being held as one EXIF field called Orientation: a number from 1 to 8 meaning "turn this a quarter clockwise", "mirror it", and so on. Software that reads the field shows the photo upright. Software that ignores it shows the raw sensor frame. Both are being honest about the same file.
The ones that ignore it tend to be a layer deeper than anywhere you would think to check: the thumbnail a site generates on its server, the copy an application form resizes, the file a print lab rasterises. Which is why it looks fine on your computer and wrong after you have submitted it.
The fix
Turn the pixels instead of describing the turn. PIXLFLW draws the photo the way you are seeing it and re-encodes it at that orientation, so the saved file needs no tag to come out right and there is nothing left for anything downstream to ignore.
Because the pixels are rewritten, the file is re-compressed. On a JPG that costs a generation of quality — small at the default setting, but not zero; the export button shows the resulting size before you save, and PNG is there if you would rather not compress at all.
Rotated, or just the wrong way up?
If the photo is upside down, or you want a quarter turn the camera never recorded, that is the Rotate step in the editor rather than this page — it is one click away once the file is open, at any angle you like.
How to fix a rotated photo
- Drop the photo into the upload area. It appears the right way up here, because browsers do read the orientation tag.
- Save. What you saw is now what the file contains.
The metadata goes with it, by the way — a canvas holds pixels only, so EXIF, GPS and comments do not survive the re-encode. If that is the part you came for, the EXIF remover does it without touching the compression.