Skip to content

Dear Internet Explorer user: Your browser is no longer supported

Please switch to a modern browser such as Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome to view this website's content.

Rotate or flip multiple image files using PowerShell

Use a PowerShell script in Microsoft Windows to rotate or flip large numbers of images automatically.

Having taken a large number of digital photos for a particular project, I needed to rotate them all 90-degrees for further processing.

Whilst it’s possible to open Adobe Photoshop or other image manipulation software and rotate images, this quickly becomes unfeasible when the numbers get into the dozens.

Thankfully it’s possible to employ Microsoft PowerShell to do the work for you. PowerShell can batch rotate and/or flip images in the BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and WMF formats. Bear in mind that there may be a loss of quality going from a format such as TIFF to a format such as JPEG.

The following script will rotate PNG and JPG images 90-degrees in the target directory and any sub-directories:

$path = "c:/path/to/files" #target directory

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Drawing")
Get-ChildItem -recurse ($path) -include @("*.png", "*.jpg") |
ForEach-Object {
  $image = [System.Drawing.image]::FromFile( $_ )
  $image.rotateflip("Rotate90FlipNone")
  $image.save($_)
}

Images of a specific type can be targeted by specifying these within -include. This script will recurse any subdirectories, but this can be removed by deleting the -recurse command.

Rotation Options

$image.rotateflip("Rotate90FlipNone") tells PowerShell to rotate the image 90-degrees but not to flip the image.

According to The Scripting Guy, the following rotation and flipping options are available:

Name Description
RotateNoneFlipNone Uses no rotation and no flipping.
Rotate90FlipNone Uses a 90-degree rotation without flipping.
Rotate180FlipNone Uses a 180-degree rotation without flipping.
Rotate270FlipNone Uses a 270-degree rotation without flipping.
RotateNoneFlipX Uses no rotation followed by a horizontal flip.
Rotate90FlipX Uses a 90-degree rotation followed by a horizontal flip.
Rotate180FlipX Uses a 180-degree rotation followed by a horizontal flip.
Rotate270FlipX Uses a 270-degree rotation followed by a horizontal flip.
RotateNoneFlipY Uses no rotation followed by a vertical flip.
Rotate90FlipY Uses a 90-degree rotation followed by a vertical flip.
Rotate180FlipY Uses a 180-degree rotation followed by a vertical flip.
Rotate270FlipY Uses a 270-degree rotation followed by a vertical flip.
RotateNoneFlipXY Uses no rotation followed by a horizontal and vertical flip.
Rotate90FlipXY Uses a 90-degree rotation followed by a horizontal and vertical flip.
Rotate180FlipXY Uses a 180-degree rotation followed by a horizontal and vertical flip.
Rotate270FlipXY Uses a 270-degree rotation followed by a horizontal and vertical flip.

Simply substitute the relevant command in the code prior to execution.

   

Comments

4 responses to “Rotate or flip multiple image files using PowerShell”

On 9 June 2018, Thorkil wrote: Hyperlink chain icon

When using this method, my JPG changes from 3MB to 16MB…
Not acceptable !

Any suggestions about how to avoid ?

Reply

    On 24 December 2019, Alex wrote: Hyperlink chain icon

    $image.save($_, “jpeg”) or your file gets a losless PNG-conversion.

    Reply

On 7 July 2018, Jackie Tong wrote: Hyperlink chain icon

Thanks that was exactly what I needed.
With Windows 10 which has Powershell readily installed it ran with a lightning speed – definitely recommend this post to other users of this as ultimate solution.

Reply

On 24 December 2022, roger wrote: Hyperlink chain icon

Hi, I’m trying to use powershell to rotate EMF file, is there a way to do it?

Reply

Have Your Say

The following HTML is permitted:
<a href="" title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Comments will be published subject to the Editorial Policy.