How to mirror/flip photos on Windows 10
Most photos today are taken on our phones and not on dedicated cameras and our phones are exceptionally smart. When you take a photo, you know that any text on it, or say a complex pattern on someone’s T-Shirt, will show up as it is. It won’t be ‘reversed’. This phenomena of reversed items simply doesn’t exist if you use your phone to take photos. That said, there may still be exceptions and if you have a photo with the text or other items showing up backwards, you can flip photos to fix it.
Flipping a photo is a fairly basic edit that most image viewers and practically all image editors have.
Flip photos
The stock Photos app on Windows 10 has basic image editing features and you can use it to flip photos pretty easily.
Open the photo that you want to flip in the Photos app. Click the Edit & Create button at the top. From the menu that opens, select Edit.
When the photo opens for editing, you will see a panel on the right with various controls for editing the image. One of these controls is a button called Flip. Click it, and the image will be flipped/mirrored. You can then save it over the original, or as a copy.
The Photos app only flips in one direction which is horizontal. If you need to flip an image on its vertical axis, you need to use a free app called IrfanView. Most Windows users have heard of this app as it’s a popular image viewer and editor that has been around for quite a few years.
Open the image that you want to mirror/flip in IrfanView. Go to the Image menu item and in the menu that opens you will find both Horizontal and Vertical flip controls. Use them to flip the image however you want, and then save it over the original, or as a copy.
Flipping photos normally doesn’t have an impact on their quality however make sure that when you save the flipped image, either over the original or as a copy, that you do not have any compression presets already enabled. IrfanView does allow you to compress images so be careful that you don’t accidentally use one of its compression features for a photo you want to preserve the quality of.
Photos doesn’t offer image compression nor does it allow users to convert photos from one format to the other so it’s a safer option.
