How to Flip a Video on iPhone

The fastest way to flip a video on iPhone is to open it in Photos, tap Edit, open the crop tool, and tap the flip control to mirror it horizontally. Here's the full sequence, plus the front-camera problem it usually fixes.

Flip a video on iPhone with the Photos app

Open the clip in Photos and tap Edit, then open the crop tool. The same place rotation lives, since Photos treats flipping and rotating as two settings inside one tool rather than separate features. Tap the flip control to mirror the image horizontally, tap Done, then save. Save Video as New Clip keeps the original around if you want to compare both versions, which is worth doing here more than on most edits. A flipped clip can look subtly wrong in a way that's hard to place until you see the two side by side.

The front-camera clip where every word reads backwards

Front-camera footage is previewed mirrored, the way a mirror shows you your own reflection, so that turning your head left on screen matches turning it left in real life. It's a deliberate choice that makes the preview feel natural to look at while filming. The side effect is that any readable text in the shot comes out backwards in the recording: a name on a t-shirt, handwriting on a whiteboard, a sign in the background, a number on a jersey. None of that is visible while you're filming, because the mirrored preview reads correctly to you in the moment. It only shows up once you watch the footage back. The tell is simple: if text in the frame doesn't read correctly, that's a mirrored clip. Flipping it puts the text back the right way round without affecting the framing, the crop or anything else about the shot.

Clips with no readable text at all rarely need this fix. A mirrored face or a mirrored background isn't something most viewers notice or care about. The check is worth running specifically when there's something in frame meant to be read, not as a routine step on every clip.

Seeing the real frame before you export

Montaj shows you the actual frame you're editing before export, so what you see while cutting and captioning is what actually ships, no surprise mirroring after the fact, and no gap between what the editor previewed and what ends up in the file. Once you've flipped a video on iPhone the right way, that preview is what you're exporting, not an approximation of it.