Rotate a PDF

How it works

1. Choose the PDF and every page is drawn as a thumbnail. Or drop the whole folder of them, up to twenty at once, and skip the thumbnails.
2. On one file, rotate everything at once or click the pages that are wrong and rotate just those. On a folder there is one question instead: which way to turn every page in all of them.
3. Download. The rotation is saved into the file, not just into your screen. One file comes back as a file, a folder comes back as one zip with the same names inside.

What you get

• Rotate every page, or only the ones you select
• Left and right on each individual page
• A thumbnail that redraws at the new angle, so there is no guessing
• Mixed documents handled, where some pages are portrait and some are landscape
• A whole folder in one go, up to twenty files, every page turned the same way, back as one zip
• A file that will not open is named rather than silently dropped, so you know which original to keep
• No quality loss, because the page turns rather than being redrawn
• No upload, no watermark, no account

Why rotating in your reader does not stick

Most PDF readers have a rotate button, and on most of them it only changes what you are looking at. Close the file, send it, and it opens sideways again for the next person. That is because the view was rotated, not the document.

This writes the rotation into the page itself, which is a property the PDF format actually stores. Every reader, every printer and every permit portal then shows it the same way you do.

Where sideways pages come from

Sheet feed scanners fed a landscape drawing through the portrait way. Phone cameras used to photograph a document taped to a wall. A large format plan reduced to letter by whoever sent it. And the classic, a two sided stack loaded upside down, which produces a file where every other page is rotated 180 degrees.

That last one is what the select and rotate buttons are for. Rotate the selection twice and only the affected pages move.

A scanner run goes wrong all at once

A page is rarely sideways on its own. The feeder was loaded the same way for the whole run, so the whole run came out the same way wrong: forty inspection reports all a quarter turn out, a morning of receipts all upside down, a set of as builts scanned landscape because the drawings are landscape and the scanner was not asked. Opening twenty files one after another to press the same button twenty times is not work, it is just time.

So hand over the folder. Up to twenty files at once, one question asked once, which way to turn. Every page in every file gets that turn and they come back as one zip called pdfs-rotated.zip with your own file names inside it, ready to send on.

There are no thumbnails on that screen, on purpose. The thumbnails exist so you can pick the pages that are wrong, and in a folder you are not picking. What is left is the question the thumbnails were there to answer.

Which means the folder is the wrong screen when only some pages in some files are wrong. That really is per file work, and the answer is to open them one at a time here, or to use delete and reorder pages if they need reordering too. This tool cannot tell which way up a page is supposed to be, and it does not guess. It turns what you tell it to turn.

It matters more on a submission than on a screen

A human reviewer will tilt their head. An automated intake will not. Permit portals, insurance claim systems and lien filing services all run text extraction on what you upload, and a rotated page can come back with the text in the wrong reading order or with nothing found at all.

If the page is rotated and also in the wrong place in the document, fix both at once in delete and reorder pages, which has the same rotation controls with reordering on top.

Nothing is uploaded

The file is opened, drawn and rewritten by your own browser. Nothing is sent to this site, because this site has no place to send it to. Load the page, disconnect, and the tool still works.

Questions people ask

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