You don't need an app to mirror a video on an iPhone. The Photos app does it, it's just hidden inside the crop tool. Flipping a video upside down is less obvious, and a sideways video needs rotating, which is a different fix entirely. Here's each one.
The fast answer
- Mirror it (left ↔ right): Photos → Edit → Crop → the flip button → Done.
- Upside down (top ↔ bottom): in the same crop tool, rotate twice (180°), then flip. That combination is a vertical mirror.
- It's sideways, not mirrored: that's rotation. Use the rotate button next to flip, not flip itself.
- Text in your selfie video reads backwards: mirror it, as above.
Mirror a video in Photos
- Open the video in Photos.
- Tap Edit.
- Tap Crop at the bottom.
- Tap the flip button at the top: a triangle with arrows, next to the rotate button.
- Tap Done.
The edit is non-destructive. To go back, open the video, tap Edit, then Revert. If you want to keep both versions side by side, Duplicate the video first (⋯ → Duplicate) and flip the copy.
Flip a video upside down
Photos has no vertical flip button, but you can build one. A vertical mirror is the same as rotating 180° and then mirroring horizontally:
- Edit → Crop.
- Tap rotate twice, so the video is upside down.
- Tap flip once.
- Done.
The top and bottom are now swapped, but left and right are where they were. That's the effect people usually mean by "flip vertically": a reflection in water, or a video recorded in a phone holder mounted the wrong way up.
Flip vs rotate: which one you need
They look similar in the toolbar and do completely different things.
- Flip produces a mirror image. Text reads backwards; a person's parting moves to the other side. Use it when the video is a reflection of what you wanted.
- Rotate turns the whole frame by 90°. Nothing is reversed. Use it when the video is sideways, usually because the phone was held in landscape while orientation lock was on, or the phone was flat when recording began.
Flipping a sideways video gives you a sideways mirror image, which is not an improvement.
Why selfie videos come out mirrored, or don't
The front camera shows you a mirror image while you record, because that's what people expect to see. What it saves depends on your settings and the mode, which is why a selfie video sometimes looks "wrong" afterwards: the saved file shows you as others see you, not as the mirror does.
Settings → Camera → Mirror Front Camera controls whether front-camera shots are saved the way the preview looked. It's aimed at photos, and the reliable fix for a video you've already recorded is the same three taps above: flip it in Photos.
The tell that a video needs mirroring is text. If a sign or a T-shirt reads backwards, flip it.
When Photos isn't enough
The Photos route covers a single mirror. It runs out when:
- You also want to trim, crop to 9:16, change speed or reverse it. Each is a separate tool, or not in Photos at all, and doing them in different apps means exporting and re-importing between steps.
- You want a one-tap vertical flip rather than the rotate-twice trick.
- You need a GIF or just the audio out of the flipped clip.
A small editor that keeps those tools on one screen does all of it in one export.
Flip horizontally or vertically with one tap each, and stack it with trim, crop, speed and reverse in a single export. Free, no watermark.
What it doesThat's our app. One honest limitation for this page: it flips but doesn't rotate yet, so for a sideways video, Photos' rotate button is the right tool.
On a Mac
QuickTime Player mirrors without anything to install: open the video, then Edit → Flip Horizontal or Edit → Flip Vertical, and File → Export As to save. It's one of the few places where vertical flip is a single command.
For a batch, ffmpeg does it from the terminal:
ffmpeg -i in.mov -vf hflip -c:a copy out.mov
Use vflip instead of hflip for upside down. The -c:a copy keeps the
audio as it was, since flipping only changes the picture.
Does flipping lose quality?
Any edit that re-encodes a video loses a little quality, and flipping has to re-encode, because every frame changes. At the original resolution and a sensible bitrate the difference isn't visible. It becomes visible when a clip is edited, exported and re-imported several times, so do all the edits in one pass where you can.