📶Straighten a Photo

About this photo straightener

Almost every handheld photo is a degree or two off level, and the eye notices it even when it cannot say why. Drag the slider to rotate in tenths of a degree, or use the level line: click "Draw a level line" and drag along something that should be horizontal — a sea horizon, a window sill, the top of a door — and the correct angle is worked out and applied.

Drag along something vertical instead, like a lamp post or a door frame, and the tool plumbs to that. Either works; use whichever the photo gives you.

Why straightening always crops

Rotating a rectangle leaves empty wedges in the corners. The only way to remove them is to crop inwards to the largest rectangle of the same shape that still fits inside the rotated frame, which is what happens automatically.

The cost is smaller than people expect at small angles and grows quickly: one degree costs around 3% of the frame, five degrees around 15%, and ten degrees closer to a third. That is the practical argument for getting it level in camera — and for straightening before you crop, never after, so the crop is applied to what actually survives.

Working on your own device

The photo is decoded, rotated and re-encoded entirely inside this browser tab. It is never uploaded, and the original file on your device is left untouched — the download is a new file. That also means the tool works offline once the page has loaded.

Save as JPEG for photographs and PNG for screenshots or anything with sharp edges and flat colour. Once the horizon is level, the image cropper handles composition, and the image resizer handles output size and file size for the web.

Frequently asked questions