How to Flip a Video on Mac

The fastest way to flip a video on Mac is to open it in QuickTime Player, choose View > Show Clips, select the clip, and pick Flip Horizontally from the Edit menu. Here's that, the Photos alternative, and how to tell whether a clip needs flipping at all.

Flip a video on Mac with QuickTime Player

Open the movie and choose View > Show Clips. Select the clip , it gains a yellow outline , then open the Edit menu, where you'll find Flip Horizontally and Flip Vertically alongside the rotation commands. Horizontal is almost always the one you want: it's the mirror operation, the one that puts backwards text back into reading order. Vertical turns the picture upside down without mirroring it, which looks like a mistake in nearly every context. Click Done when you're happy.

Photos does the same thing from a different angle. Open the clip, click Edit, then Crop, and use the Flip button. It flips the image horizontally, and Option-clicking it flips vertically instead. Same result, and useful if you were already cropping.

Check the writing in the shot, not the face

This is the case that sends people looking for a flip command in the first place, and it has a specific cause. Preview windows mirror you on purpose: without it, raising your right hand appears to raise the left one on screen and every small adjustment goes the wrong way. That mirroring is meant to be a display convenience. When it ends up baked into the recording instead, the result is a clip where you look normal , because you have no strong opinion about which side your face is on , while every piece of writing in the shot is reversed.

So the check is text, not faces. A logo on a shirt, a whiteboard, a book spine, a sign on the wall. If it reads backwards, flip horizontally. If there's nothing readable in the frame, there's genuinely nothing to fix, and flipping is a coin toss.

Nothing has to leave the machine to be un-mirrored

Search for a way to flip a clip and most of the results want you to hand it to a website first. That's a strange trade for one of the cheapest operations in video. You're uploading a recording of your face and your room to reverse an axis.

Montaj does its work entirely on your device. Your video is never uploaded, for this or for anything else it does to the clip afterwards. If you flip a video on Mac with the built-in apps, you're already in that position for one operation; the point is keeping it true for the rest of the edit, including the parts where the temptation to hand the file to a server is much stronger.