How to Rotate a Video, and Why It Plays Sideways in One App but Not Another
Rotate a video 90°, 180° or 270° without losing quality, fix a clip that is sideways in only one app, and turn landscape into portrait the right way.
Updated September 15, 20266 min read
To rotate a video, choose 90° clockwise, 180° or 270° and export as MP4 or MOV: the quarter turn is recorded in the file as an orientation and the compressed picture is copied across untouched, so nothing is lost. The harder case is a clip that already looks right on your phone and turns up sideways somewhere else. That is a different problem with a different fix, and it is the one most people searching "video is sideways" actually have.
Two ways a video can be rotated
A video's orientation can live in two places. The first is a note in the file saying how to turn the picture when it is played. Phones rely on this constantly: a portrait clip is often stored as a landscape picture plus an instruction to show it a quarter turn round. The second is the pixels themselves — every frame redrawn the right way up.
| Orientation note | Redrawn pixels | |
|---|---|---|
| What changes | One instruction in the file | Every frame |
| Quality | Identical to the source | Compressed once more |
| Time | Roughly the time it takes to read the file | Grows with length and resolution |
| Angles | 90°, 180° and 270° only | Any angle, plus mirroring |
| Weak point | Anything that ignores the note shows it sideways | None — the picture is the answer |
The rotate tool uses the note whenever it can: a quarter turn, no mirroring, exported as MP4 or MOV. WebM can store an orientation too, but too many players ignore it to depend on, so a WebM export is always redrawn. The panel beside the button tells you which route your settings will take, and why, before you start.
Why a video is sideways in one app and upright in another
Because one app reads the orientation note and the other does not. Well-behaved players honour it. Some upload pipelines, older players and editing programs ignore it and show the raw frames — which, for a portrait phone clip, means a picture lying on its side.
Adding another quarter turn to the note will not help such a destination, because it is not reading the note at all. The fix is to write the orientation into the pixels. Tick Write the rotation into the picture and the frames are rebuilt the way you see them, so nothing downstream has to be trusted. It costs one re-encode, and the tool aims at the bitrate your source actually used, so the file does not come back larger. When a clip you add carries an orientation note, the tool says so and offers this directly.
The workflow
Add the clip
The free plan rotates one video at a time, up to 200 MB and ten minutes. Pro lifts the size and length caps and rotates batches of up to twenty, downloaded as one archive.
Choose the turn
90° is a quarter turn clockwise, 180° is upside down, 270° is a quarter turn anticlockwise. Custom takes any angle from −180° to 180°, on the free plan as well.
Check the preview
It shows the exported frame, borders included. A 90° or 270° turn swaps width and height, so a 1920 × 1080 clip becomes 1080 × 1920; 180° keeps the dimensions.
Pick MP4 or MOV
Both carry the orientation note, so a quarter turn copies the picture across untouched. MP4 is the safest choice for sharing; MOV suits Apple software.
Decide about sound
Audio is kept by default. Switch it off to export a silent clip in the same pass.
Quarter turns into MP4 or MOV lose nothing and finish quickly. It all runs on your device, not our servers, so a large clip is limited by your machine rather than an upload.
Rotate a videoRotate or flip? They fix different mistakes
Rotation turns the picture; a flip mirrors it. Footage from a front-facing camera or a teleprompter rig, where text in shot reads backwards, needs a horizontal flip — rotating it 180° only turns it upside down and leaves the text reversed.
- Flip horizontally mirrors left to right. The usual fix for backwards text.
- Flip vertically mirrors top to bottom — rarely what anyone wants on its own.
- Both at once is exactly a 180° rotation, so into MP4 or MOV it copies without re-encoding.
- A single flip cannot be stored as an orientation, so it always redraws the frames.
The rotate tool has both flips built in. The dedicated flip tool adds a mirror-fold, which reflects one half of the frame onto the other, and exports MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV.
Landscape to portrait is not a rotation
Rotate a 16:9 landscape clip by 90° and you do get a portrait frame — with everything in it lying on its side. What people asking this usually want is an upright picture inside a 9:16 frame, and that takes a crop or bars, not a turn.
- Crop it. The video cropper has a 9:16 preset alongside 1:1, 4:5, 16:9, 4:3, 3:2 and 2:1. A full-height 9:16 slice of a 16:9 frame keeps just under a third of its width, so choose which third carefully.
- Fit it with bars. The aspect ratio tool keeps the whole picture inside a 9:16 frame and fills the gaps with black, blur, a solid colour, an image or mirrored edges. Its Fill mode crops instead, with zoom and a nine-way position control.
On the aspect ratio tool the free plan exports up to 720p; Pro goes to 2160p and adds custom ratios, blur strength and image backgrounds. Vertical video for Reels and Shorts covers what to keep in frame, and cropping to an aspect ratio is the same thinking applied to stills.
Straightening a tilted shot
A horizon that is two degrees off is a rotation problem, just not a quarter-turn one. Choose Custom, nudge the angle a degree at a time, and set the fill to Crop to fill: the tool keeps the largest rectangle of your video's own shape that fits inside the tilted frame, so the result is level, full and still the aspect ratio it started as. Black and white fills keep every pixel and show wedges in the corners instead.
Any free angle redraws every frame, so do it once, from the original, rather than in several small passes. If the problem is wobble rather than tilt, stabilising the footage is the fix.
Frequently asked questions
How do I rotate a video 90 degrees?
Add it to the rotate tool, choose 90° for a quarter turn clockwise or 270° for anticlockwise, and export as MP4 or MOV. The turn is written into the file's orientation and the picture is copied across, so the result is identical to the original, just the right way round.
Does rotating a video reduce its quality?
Not for 90°, 180° or 270° turns exported as MP4 or MOV, which copy the compressed picture untouched. A single flip, a free angle, a WebM export or writing the rotation into the picture redraws every frame and compresses it once more.
Why is my video sideways after I upload it?
Your phone stored the picture one way round with a note saying how to turn it, and the site you uploaded to ignored the note. Export again with Write the rotation into the picture ticked, so the orientation is in the pixels and nothing needs to read it.
How do I rotate a video from landscape to portrait?
Rotating alone turns the picture on its side. For an upright portrait video, crop a 9:16 slice with the video cropper, or fit the whole landscape picture into a 9:16 frame with bars using the aspect ratio tool.
Can I rotate a video online for free?
Yes. The free plan rotates one video at a time, up to 200 MB and ten minutes, including custom angles, flips and writing the rotation into the picture. Pro removes the size cap and adds batches.