how to rotate an image with Mac Photos without changing the size?

Dannymac22 wrote: Maybe someone could just agree with what I am seeing.

It looks to me like everyone understands exactly what you are seeing. You have a picture like this:

You don't like that tower to be at such a funny angle, so you straighten it and get this

With the tower nice and straight (and my wife leaning....)

But you wanted this:

And it seems to me that everyone told you that Photos doesn't do that-- Photos always makes rectangular pictures. This is not unusual for popular image editors. In fact, I don't remember anyone in this discussion group ever before mentioning that they needed this, so it's not likely to be something Apple would add to Photos.

That's why léonie thoughtfully suggested using GraphicConverter ($40) which is what I used to make the above image of the famous leaning wife of Pisa.

By the way, there is no "expansion" going on. As Yer_Man explained, in Photos, the remaining picture fills the screen, just like any other pictures does. One of the main advantages to straightening and/or cropping a picture is that the main subject better fills the screen.

I hope this helps you see what we see...

The crop tool is cropping the image automatically to the size of the embedded rectangle when you straighten the image to avoid empty triangles at the border. The crop tool can only crop to a rectangle with horizontal and vertical borders. The same goes for the perspective correction tool.

To avoid the cropping you have to extend the canvas with an external editor before you straighten the image - then you can straighten it without cutting off parts of the image.

I am using Graphic Converter or Luminar 4 to add a very wide border around the image. You can also use Preview to create a very large empty image and paste the image you want to straighten into the center of the new, empty background. Then straighten this image and use the retouch tool to fill-in the empty triangles at the border.

If you take a screenshot of the straightened image you may lose resolution, because the resolution will be limited to the pixel size of your display.

Photos does not support rotating images at specific angles. If you use the Straighten function in Crop, the edges of the image will get cropped regardless of the degree of rotation.

The simplest solution might be to use third-party software or online services. Rotating an image at a specific angle is a relatively simple task, and you should be able to find many tools online that can meet your needs.

Another workaround is to use Preview. Open your image with Preview and use a two finger twisting gesture to rotate the image as you like. The image will snap back to normal once you let go, but you can take a screenshot to clipboard while maintaining the rotated view. Then, paste it from the clipboard into preview and save it. The image generated by this workaround may differ in quality from the original one and might require cropping to achieve a better result.

By expand, do you mean that the image zooms in a little - or a lot - depending on how much you you're straightening? This is inevitable, as the app is straightening the image not the canvas. In fact, Photos has no concept of canvas - the image is the canvas.

There is no way to do what you want with an app as basic as Photos. With a more powerful editor you could straighten the canvas but what would give you irregular what (or whatever colour you choose) borders around the image. That's what the external editor feature is for.

If you look at this picture:

And make it a rectangle with no white stuff:

(Most people don't like the white parts in their pictures.)

Then you get this

Looks bigger, because the straightened rectangular image fills the space. If it's rotated more, then more of the corners must be cut off to make a rectangle, and so it fills the space more.

Also, if its aspect ratio becomes closer to the aspect ratio of the screen, then it fills better. My camera takes pictures in a 4:3 aspect ratio, but I almost always crop them to 16:9 or 16:10 to fill a TV or Computer screen. I re-crop for digital picture frames or web spaces.

If rotating an image cuts off an important part of the the picture, I usually choose to rotate it less rather than leaving white corners. Or I trash the image.

You also asked about changing the size of a photo in Photos. You can view a photo enlarged using the zoom slider , and you can export photos at different sizes with File - Export. But Photos will always preserve the original in Photos unmodified.

Again, the image is not enlarged. It is zoomed in so that the resulting crop fits within the available image. Given the example you show it's not surprising that the core of the image is lost - that's a pretty significant tilt in the shot. A lesson for the camera operator more than the editor I would suggest. The issue here is that the operator has not allowed him/herself enough space to recover the situation. The straighten feature works perfectly well when you have a little tilt, not a shot like that.

"Straighten" means "rotate as you wish and crop off the white stuff to make a rectangular picture." Then it displays fulling the screen, just like it does all pictures.

See what's happening. You're confusing the subject of the photograph - the bird - with the photograph. Yes, the subject of the image seems larger because the image is zoomed in. Zooming does not change the size of the photograph.