How to Crop a Video on iPhone

The fastest way to crop a video on iPhone is to open our free browser cropper, import your clip, drag the crop frame (or pick a ratio like 9:16), and download the cropped MP4, no app install, no upload, no watermark. Here's the step-by-step, plus how to crop to vertical and finish the edit.

Open the free Video Cropper →

Crop a video with the iPhone Photos app

iOS can crop video natively. Open the clip in Photos, tap Edit, tap the crop icon at the bottom right, then drag the corners freely or tap a preset instead: Square, Wallpaper, 9:16 and 5:7 are all built in, and tapping one snaps the crop to that exact ratio rather than leaving you to eyeball it. A lock icon in the top right toggles the ratio lock. Locked, the crop stays fixed to the chosen preset as you reposition it; unlocked, you can drag the corners to any custom frame instead. Tap Done and choose Save Video to overwrite the clip, or Save Video as New Clip to keep the original alongside the cropped version.

It's built in and quick. What it won't do is anything after the crop: no subtitles, no silence removal, no audio cleanup, and everything stays flattened into one clip with no way to undo the framing decision later without starting over from the original.

Unlocking the ratio is worth doing deliberately rather than by accident. A custom crop set with the lock off won't snap back to a clean 9:16 or square later, so it's easy to end up with a frame that's close to a standard ratio but not quite it, which some platforms handle by adding their own letterboxing on top.

The fastest way to crop to 9:16 and finish

Cropping to vertical is usually step one for a Reel, Short or TikTok. The slow part comes after: subtitles, cutting dead air, cleaning up the audio. None of which a crop tool touches, no matter how precise the ratio.

Montaj is built around vertical 9:16 editing and handles that follow-up work automatically — it transcribes your clip, generates word-by-word karaoke subtitles you can edit inline, and removes silences in one tap, all on-device. You still get a real timeline for manual cuts, reordering and B-roll layers with split-screen, backed by 100 levels of undo if a framing or edit decision needs to be walked back.

It runs on your device, so your footage is never uploaded, and it exports at 1080×1920 with no watermark. Every export is verified. Duration, dimensions, audio and frame decoding are checked before it's declared done.