How to Rotate a Video on iPhone

The fastest way to rotate a video on iPhone is to open it in Photos, tap Edit, open the crop tool, and tap the rotate control until the clip is upright, no app to install. Here's the exact sequence, and why the clip ended up sideways in the first place.

Rotate a video on iPhone in the Photos app

Open the clip in Photos and tap Edit. Photos' crop tools work on videos the same way they work on photos, so the rotate control sits right there in the crop tool, next to the same aspect-ratio presets used for cropping. Rotation and framing live in one place rather than two separate tools. Each tap turns the clip 90 degrees. Four taps get you back to the original orientation. Tap Done, then choose Save Video to overwrite the clip, or Save Video as New Clip to keep the original alongside the rotated copy, which is worth doing on a rotate specifically, since a clip that looks upright on your phone can still be sideways to whatever app or device it ends up watched on.

Why the clip was sideways in the first place

A sideways clip is usually a filming issue, not an editing one. Orientation lock was likely on, which stops the camera from registering that the phone was turned, so it records the frame as if the phone were still upright even though it wasn't. That's why the fix in Photos is really a correction after the fact, not a setting anyone chose on purpose. Rotating the finished clip in Photos fixes the display after the fact; keeping orientation lock off during filming, and glancing at the camera preview before hitting record, avoids the problem happening on the next ten clips.

Sideways footage tends to surface at the worst possible time, too. After it's already been imported into an editor, or after it's been sent to someone else who now has to rotate it on their end. Catching it in Photos before it goes anywhere else is the cheapest point in the whole process to fix it.

Editing in the frame you'll actually post in

Montaj edits in a vertical 9:16 frame from the start, so a clip doesn't need a separate rotation pass to match the format most short-form video actually gets watched in. What's on screen while editing is the orientation that ships, with no rotate step tucked in before export. Once you've rotated a video on iPhone the right way up, that's the frame you'll be editing and exporting in.