Rotate a Video on iPhone and Keep It That Way

You open a video that’s sideways, rotate it right in Photos, and it looks perfect on your own screen.

Then you send it to a friend, post it somewhere, or open it in another app, and it’s sideways again, or apparently sideways, depending on which app they’re using. That inconsistency isn’t you doing anything wrong. It’s how a lot of video pipelines handle rotation, and it’s fixable.

Rotating a video natively

Open the video in Photos, tap Edit, and select the crop tool, the icon that looks like two overlapping right angles at the bottom of the editing toolbar.

You’ll see a rotate button in the corner of the crop screen that turns the video 90 degrees with each tap, and a dial along the bottom you can drag for finer adjustment if the horizon or framing needs a small nudge rather than a full quarter-turn.

Tap Done to save it. On your iPhone, in Photos, this looks correct from that point forward.

Why it can look sideways again elsewhere

Here’s the part that trips people up. Video files can store orientation two different ways: some players actually re-encode and rewrite every pixel in the new orientation, while others leave the pixel data untouched and just write a rotation flag into the file’s metadata, a transform matrix telling a player “display this rotated 90 degrees.” Photos on iOS reads that flag correctly and shows you the rotated version.

Plenty of other apps, older video players, some upload pipelines, some Android apps, some web tools, either skip that flag entirely or handle it inconsistently, and show you the raw, unrotated pixels instead.

This is a known, long-standing class of bug across video software generally, going back at least as far as the earliest iPhones that shot video, and it isn’t unique to one iOS version or one app.

The fix: force a re-encode

The reliable way around it is making sure the rotation gets baked into the actual pixels rather than left as a metadata flag for the receiving app to interpret.

The practical route is running the rotated video through Shortcuts’ Save to Photo Album or Encode Media action after editing it in Photos: select the rotated clip in Photos or Files, share it into a shortcut built around either of those actions, and let it write out a new file.

Re-encoding through Shortcuts this way forces the video into its new orientation as actual pixel data, so a player that ignores rotation metadata still displays it correctly, since there’s no metadata left for it to ignore.

If you don’t want to build a shortcut for this, exporting the video through Photos’ own share options into a different format sometimes triggers a re-encode as a side effect. It’s less predictable than a dedicated Encode Media action, worth treating as a fallback rather than the first thing to try.

Rotating without permanently cropping

One thing worth knowing before you commit to a rotation: the crop tool’s rotate button changes the video’s aspect ratio boundaries along with its orientation, so a landscape clip rotated to portrait will often show black bars or get cropped at the edges depending on the original framing.

If you need to fix the framing at the same time as the rotation, the full crop workflow is covered at cropping a video on iPhone.

If the clip is longer than it needs to be and you’d rather trim it down before dealing with orientation, trimming a video on iPhone without an app covers that step, often easier to do before rotating than after.

If it’s a photo, not a video

The same looks-fine-here-sideways-elsewhere problem happens with photos too, for the same metadata reason, an EXIF orientation tag instead of a video transform matrix. Rotating a photo on iPhone covers the photo-specific version of this, including why some apps that read EXIF correctly most of the time still occasionally get it wrong.

Frequently asked questions

Why does my rotated video play sideways when I send it to someone?

Some apps store rotation as a metadata flag rather than rewriting the actual pixels, and the app or player on the receiving end may not read that flag correctly. Photos on iOS handles it correctly; not every app elsewhere does.

How do I permanently fix a video’s rotation so it stays correct everywhere?

Re-encode it after rotating, so the new orientation is baked into the pixel data instead of left as a metadata flag. Running it through a Shortcuts action like Save to Photo Album or Encode Media after editing in Photos is the practical way to force that.

Does rotating a video in Photos crop it?

It can. Rotating changes the video’s orientation boundaries, so depending on the original framing you may see black bars or lose some edge content. If framing matters, use the full crop tool rather than just the rotate button.

Is this the same issue as photos looking sideways in other apps?

Same root cause, different metadata field. Photos use an EXIF orientation tag; videos use a transform matrix. Both rely on the receiving app reading the flag correctly.

Can I rotate a video without opening the crop tool?

Not for a permanent rotation. The crop tool’s rotate button and dial are the built-in path in Photos for changing a video’s orientation.