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Crop and rotate video

Crop a video to 9:16, square or any shape, and rotate or flip it. Turning an MP4 or MOV is instant and loses nothing. Nothing is uploaded.

  • Runs in your browser
  • Nothing is uploaded
  • Free, no sign-up

or drop it here. MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV. Nothing is uploaded.

How it works

Choose a video and a frame from it is shown under a crop box. Drag the box's edges and corners to crop the video, or pick a shape: 9:16 for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, 1:1 square, 4:5 for the Instagram feed or 16:9 for YouTube. Rotate left and right turn the video a quarter turn at a time, and the flip buttons mirror it. The slider under the picture moves through the video, so you can check the crop keeps what matters all the way through.

Rotating an MP4 or MOV without cropping or flipping copies the picture and sound into a new file and sets its rotation, the same setting phones write when they film upright, so it is instant and nothing is lost. An MKV with H.264 or HEVC video is rotated the same way into an MP4. A WebM can't store a rotation players follow, so its picture is encoded again. If an app or editor ignores the setting and shows the video sideways, tick Turn the picture itself to encode the turn into the frames.

Cropping and flipping encode the picture again with your browser's own video encoder, at a bitrate matched to the original for the part of the picture kept. The new video is read back to check it plays and has the right size before it is offered for download. To cut the start or end off as well, use the video trimmer; to make it smaller to send, the video compressor.

Questions

How do I rotate a video without losing quality?

Choose an MP4 or MOV video, press Rotate left or Rotate right until it is the right way up, and press Save video. The picture and sound are copied as they are and only the video's rotation setting changes, which phones, computers, browsers and VLC all follow, so it takes moments even for a long video and nothing is lost. A sideways phone video is fixed the same way.

How do I crop a video to 9:16 for TikTok, Reels or Shorts?

Choose the video and press 9:16: the largest upright box that fits is placed in the middle, and you can drag it to the part you want to keep. A landscape video cropped to 9:16 keeps a tall slice of the middle; if the video was filmed sideways, rotate it first. 1:1 and 4:5 do the same for square and Instagram feed posts, and Free lets you drag any shape.

Why does cropping take longer than rotating?

A video's frames are stored compressed, so cutting part of each frame away means decoding them and encoding the new frames again, with your browser's own video encoder, as an H.264 MP4 or, where the browser can't make H.264, a VP9 WebM. Flipping is encoded the same way, because many players ignore a mirror stored as a setting. The bitrate is matched to the original, so the quality loss is small, and the sound is copied when the new file can hold it.

Is my video uploaded?

No. The video is read and the new one made in your browser, on your device, so it works offline and a large video doesn't have to upload first. The new video has no title, location or camera details from the original; iPhone videos carry the place they were filmed, and it is left out.

Limits

Opens MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM and MKV videos up to 4 GB; AVI and WMV files can't be opened. Only the main picture and sound tracks are kept; subtitles and extra sound tracks are left out. The new video is built in memory, so it can be up to 2 GB, and less on phones with little memory.

Cropping and flipping need a browser that can decode the video and encode H.264 or VP9: current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari can for most videos. Where the browser can't, such as an iPhone HEVC video in a browser without HEVC, the page says so and only rotating is offered. In testing on a computer, cropping 10 seconds of 720p video to 9:16 took 3 seconds and encoding the whole turned picture took 11; phones, 4K video and long videos take longer. Videos with a see-through background can only be rotated without encoding. The crop box snaps to even pixels, as video encoders need.

Privacy

This tool runs entirely in your browser. The files you open and what you type are never sent to a server, and nothing is stored after you close the page. See the privacy page.

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