How to Crop a Video on iPhone

We all moonlight a little as videographers these days, courtesy of our phones. Some of us aren’t even moonlighting; it’s become a day job. But whether you’re a content creator or taking videos for memories, it’s no secret that sometimes those videos need editing.

It happens all the time – there’s something in the background of the video frame that’s ruining the entire video and needs to go. But the prospect of editing a video can seem daunting. “Don’t you need some mad skills for that?” We have news for you. The only thing you need is your iPhone to nail video editing like a pro.

iPhone makes it extremely easy to crop your video from within the native Photos app. Let’s see how you can do it.

Cropping a Video

Here, we’re talking about cropping the video the way you crop a photo, i.e., changing the aspect ratio. You can crop a video if you want to remove any unwanted elements out of the frame or change the aspect ratio to make it suitable for sharing on a specific platform.

To crop a video, open the Photos app on your iPhone and open the video you want to crop. Then, tap the ‘Edit’ option in the upper-right corner of the screen.

The editing tools will open. From the toolbar at the bottom, tap the ‘Crop’ button.

The cropping tool will open in Freeform crop by default.

It means you can crop it any aspect ratio freely. Simply drag the corners of the cropper boundary inwards to crop the video. The part of the video inside the rectangle will be in the final video and the one left out will be cropped. You can also drag the corners to the outside at any point if you think you cropped the video more than you intended.

To start over at any point, tap ‘Reset’ at the top and crop again.

If you want to use any preset aspect ratios like Square, 9:16, etc., tap the ‘Aspect Ratio’ button in the upper-right corner of the screen.

Swipe left on the options bar to see all the available preset aspect ratios. Then, select one of the available preset crop options by tapping it.

To adjust the part of the video that’s in the frame, you can drag it up and down. Tap the ‘Aspect Ratio’ button again to close the toolbar.

There are also some other tools available at your disposal on the crop screen. At the top-left corner of the screen, there are two tools available. The first is the flip and the second is rotate. As the name suggests, you can use the flip tool to flip the video, i.e., mirror it, and the rotate tool to change its orientation.

And if your video needs some straightening, there are three tools available beneath the cropping portion, namely ‘Straighten’, ‘Vertical’, and ‘Horizontal’ that you can use to correct your video.

Once you’ve made all the changes, tap ‘Done’ in the bottom-right corner of the screen to save the changes.

If you want to get the original video back at any time, tap ‘Edit’ again to open the editing tools. Then, tap ‘Revert’ in the bottom-right corner of the screen.

A confirmation prompt will appear on your screen. Tap ‘Revert to Original’ to undo the changes. Once you do it, there’s no way to get back your edits. You’ll have to do everything again.