Fix a scanned PDF that came out sideways or upside down

The quick fix: turn only the wrong pages

You don't need to scan again. Open Rotate PDF, add the scanned PDF, and you see a small picture of every page. Then:

• A sideways page: click or tap its picture for a quarter turn right, or use the left arrow on its card if it leans the other way.
• An upside-down page: click its picture twice.
• The whole scan sideways: use the arrows on the file's heading to turn every page at once, then turn back any page that was already upright.
• Pages that look fine: leave them alone. They are saved exactly as they were.

Press the yellow Save button, then Download. You get a new file named after the scan with -rotated added, and your original stays as it was. Nothing is uploaded: the pages are turned inside your browser.

Turning a page this way only changes a small rotation setting that every PDF has on each page. The scanned picture itself isn't touched, so it keeps every pixel. Our post on rotating a PDF permanently explains why that matters, and why turning it in your PDF reader often doesn't stick.

Why scanners save pages the wrong way round

A scanner doesn't read your page the way you do. It records a picture of whatever is on the glass or in the tray, in the direction the paper went in. Most wrong turns come from one of these:

• The page lay on the glass the "wrong" way. On a flatbed scanner, the top of the page is meant to go towards a particular edge, often shown by a small arrow or corner mark. Lay it the other way and it comes out upside down; lay it across and it comes out on its side.
• The stack in the feeder was mixed. A document feeder pulls pages through one after another. One page put in upside down, or a landscape page put in the other way, comes out turned while the rest are fine.
• The scanner tried to guess and got it wrong. Some scanners and scanner apps look at the text to work out which way is up. That works well on a printed letter, and badly on pages with little text: photos, ID cards, stamps, signatures, handwriting and mostly empty pages.
• The scan was set to portrait. A landscape page, such as a certificate printed sideways or a wide spreadsheet, scanned on a portrait setting comes out lying on its side.

None of this damages the scan. The picture is complete; it is only shown in the wrong direction, which is exactly what a turn fixes.

Two-sided scans with every back page upside down

This is the most common pattern, and it has a simple cause. To scan the back of a sheet, the paper has to be turned over. You can turn a sheet over like the page of a book, around its long side, or like a wall calendar, around its top edge. If the paper is turned one way and the scanner expects the other, every back page comes out upside down, while every front is fine.

You can spot it at once in Rotate PDF: pages 1, 3, 5 and so on are upright, and pages 2, 4, 6 are upside down. Click each upside-down picture twice. A 30-page scan has 15 back pages, so that is 30 clicks, and the yellow 180° tag on each card shows you which ones you have done.

It is quick for the computer, too. In our tests, turning the 21 back pages of a 42-page, 47.8 MB colour scan upside down took 0.5 seconds to save in Chromium on a 4-core computer, and the file stayed 47.8 MB, since no picture is saved again.

Two other two-sided problems look similar but need a different tool:

• Blank backs. One-sided papers scanned in two-sided mode give an empty page after every real one. Remove them with Organize PDF; our post on deleting pages from a PDF shows the quickest way.
• Fronts and backs in the wrong order. If you scanned all the fronts, turned the stack over and scanned all the backs, the backs come after the fronts, often last one first. Put them in place with Organize PDF, as our post on rearranging PDF pages explains.

Phone scan apps and photos: why they go sideways

A phone works out which way is up from how it is tilted. Held flat, pointing straight down at a page on a table, it has almost nothing to go on, so it often keeps whichever direction it had before you lowered it. That is why a page photographed from above so often lands on its side.

Two more things can go wrong on the way to a PDF:

• The photo's direction note gets lost. A phone saves each photo with a small note saying which way it was held, and most apps use it to show the photo upright. Some apps drop that note when they pass the photo along, and the picture then lands in the PDF on its side.
• The scan app crops and guesses. Scan apps find the page's edges and straighten it, and some also guess the text direction. The guess can fail on the same kinds of pages scanners struggle with: ID cards, photos and handwritten notes.

If you already have the PDF, turn its pages in Rotate PDF. If you still have the photos and haven't made the PDF yet, JPG to PDF has a turn button on each picture's card, so the PDF comes out right the first time.

Documents that mix portrait and landscape pages

Many real documents mix the two: an application form in portrait, then a degree certificate printed landscape; a report with one wide table; a bank statement with a landscape summary page. Before you turn anything, tell two different cases apart:

The simple rule: turn a page when you would have to tilt your head to read it, and never just to make every page the same shape. Turning a true landscape page to portrait puts its text on its side, which is exactly the problem you are trying to fix.

To know which way to turn a sideways page, look at where the top of the text points. Top pointing left: turn right once. Top pointing right: turn left once. The guide's section on landscape pages in a portrait report has more on wide tables and charts.

A mixed document is perfectly normal for upload portals and email. Each page keeps its own size, and readers show each one the right way up, so an officer can scroll through an upright form and an upright landscape certificate without turning anything.

Printing a scan with turned or mixed pages

Print from the new -rotated file, and look at the print preview first. A few things are worth knowing:

• Landscape pages on portrait paper. Many PDF readers can pick portrait or landscape for each page by themselves when printing. Others print the whole job one way, so a landscape page comes out small in the middle of an upright sheet. The preview shows which you have, and the print settings usually let you change it.
• "Fit to page" or "shrink to fit". These settings make a page fit the paper. They are handy for a mixed document, since a wide page is scaled down instead of cut off.
• Double-sided printing. The printer's setting for flipping on the long edge or the short edge decides whether the backs come out upside down on paper. For an ordinary portrait document, long edge is the usual choice. Print two sheets as a test before a big job.
• Fix wrong pages in the file, not at the printer. A print setting changed for one sideways page is easy to forget the next time someone prints the same file.

Fixing the turn in the file means every later copy, printed or sent, comes out right without anyone having to remember a setting.

How to scan the right way up next time

A minute of care before scanning saves fixing it later. These habits help on any scanner or phone:

On a scanner or office copier

• Find the mark on the glass. Many scanners have a small arrow or corner mark showing where the top corner of the page goes. Line every page up with it, the same way each time.
• Stack the feeder the same way. Many feeders have a little picture by the tray showing whether pages go face up or face down, and which edge goes in first. Turn every sheet in the stack to match it before you start.
• Scan landscape pages on their own, or put them in the feeder the same way round as the rest, and turn them afterwards.
• Try a two-page test before a long two-sided job. If the back comes out upside down, try the scanner's other setting for turning pages over, if it has one, or plan to turn the backs afterwards.
• Check the auto-orientation setting. If your scanner software has one and it keeps getting ID cards or photos wrong, try scanning with it off and laying pages carefully, or the other way round.

With a phone scan app

• Hold the phone the same way round as the page before you lower it over the paper: upright for a portrait page. It then keeps the right idea of which way is up.
• Put the page on a plain surface darker than the paper, in good light, so the app finds the edges cleanly.
• Look at each page in the app's preview before saving. Most scan apps let you turn a page right there.
• For ID cards, such as an Aadhaar or PAN card, scan the front and the back the same way up, one after the other, so both come out upright. Small cards with little text are exactly the pages apps most often guess wrong.

Whatever you use, open the finished PDF and scroll through every page before you send it. It takes a few seconds and catches a stray sideways page before an officer does.

Before you upload or send the fixed scan

Do the jobs in this order, so each step works on the finished pages:

1. Turn the wrong pages with Rotate PDF.
2. Tidy up with Organize PDF if pages are out of order, scanned twice or blank.
3. Join separate scans into one file with Merge PDF, if the portal takes only one upload.
4. Shrink last. Scans are big. Use our PDF compressor for email, or Resize PDF when a portal sets an exact limit, like 100 KB or 200 KB. Gmail attachments can be up to 25 MB; bigger files are sent as a Google Drive link.
5. Check the file you will send by opening it and scrolling through every page.

Your scans may be Aadhaar and PAN copies, bank statements or medical reports. None of these steps uploads them: every tool here works inside your browser, and each page is blocked by its own security rules from sending data to any other site.

What turning can't fix

Turning fixes direction, and only direction. Other scan problems need another step:

• A slight tilt. A page that sits a few degrees crooked is tilted inside the scanned picture, and PDF pages turn only in quarter turns. Scan it again laid square, or use a scan app that straightens pages.
• Cut-off edges or blur. What the scanner missed isn't in the file. Scan the page again.
• Searching the text. A scan is a picture of words. Turning it upright doesn't make the words searchable or copyable; that needs text recognition (OCR), which our tools don't do.
• Pages in the wrong order, doubled or blank. Use Organize PDF.
• A password-locked scan. A PDF that needs a password to open must be unlocked first, then added again.

For everything else, see the guide's problems and quick fixes.