GIF Rotator
Rotate or flip an animated GIF, applied to every frame.
Processing: This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your input and any file you open stay on your device — nothing is uploaded to a server.
How to use the gif rotator
- Choose a GIF.
- Pick a rotation, and flip horizontally or vertically if needed.
- Rebuild and download.
About this tool
Rotation is done by moving pixels rather than by drawing through a transform, so quarter turns are exact: no resampling, no softening, and a rotation of 360 degrees returns the original file's pixels precisely. That property is asserted in the tests, because an off-by-one in a rotation is invisible in a thumbnail and obvious in a comparison.
Quarter turns swap width and height, which is expected and occasionally surprising when a landscape animation becomes portrait. Flipping is offered alongside because a mirrored animation is a different thing from a rotated one, and the two get confused — a flip reverses left and right, which reverses any text in the image too.
Browsers display animated GIFs and offer no way to read their frames — draw one to a canvas and you get the first frame only. The GIF is therefore decoded by an implementation on this page: header, colour table, LZW-compressed image data, and the disposal model that composes each frame onto the last. That last part is the one usually skipped, and skipping it is why frames come out of some tools with holes in them, since most GIFs store only the pixels that changed between frames.
Rebuilding means re-encoding, and a GIF holds at most 256 colours. The palette is recomputed from frames sampled across the whole animation rather than per frame, because a per-frame palette is larger and makes colours shift visibly as it plays.
Common uses
- Fixing an animation recorded in the wrong orientation.
- Mirroring a GIF so an action runs the other way.
- Turning a portrait capture for a landscape layout.
Frequently asked questions
- Does rotating lose quality?
- No. Quarter turns move pixels without resampling, so four 90-degree rotations return exactly the original pixels.
- Why did the dimensions change?
- A 90 or 270 degree rotation swaps width and height. A 180 degree rotation does not.
- What is the difference between rotating and flipping?
- A flip mirrors the image, reversing left and right — including any text. A rotation turns it without mirroring.
Related tools
GIF Resizer
Resize an animated GIF, keeping every frame and its timing.
GIF Cropper
Crop an animated GIF to a region, applied across every frame.
Rotate & Flip Image
Rotate an image in 90° steps and flip it horizontally or vertically.
GIF Frame Reverser
Play an animated GIF backwards, or forwards and then backwards.