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Free tool

Rotate a sideways video upright

Ninety degrees, one hundred and eighty, or two hundred and seventy. Most of the time this is written as a flag in the file rather than painted onto the frames, so it takes a second and costs nothing in quality.

Your file never leaves this tab. It is read, edited and written by your own browser, so nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored.

Why this one

What this tool gets right

Usually free of re-encoding

Containers can store 'display this rotated' as metadata. When they can, the frames are copied untouched and the export is near instant.

See it before you commit

The preview turns with the setting, so you can tell 90 from 270 without exporting twice.

Fixes the phone footage problem

A clip that looks upright on the phone and sideways on the laptop has rotation metadata one of them ignores. Exporting from here settles it.

Combine with a crop

Rotation is applied before the crop, so you drag the box on the upright picture, not the sideways one.

How it works

Three steps, about thirty seconds

01

Drop the file in

Choose a file or drag it onto the page. It opens straight away, because there is nothing to upload.

02

Set it up

Drag the handles or type exact numbers. The preview applies the same operations in the same order the encoder will.

03

Export and download

Your machine does the encoding, with a real progress bar. The file lands in your downloads folder, unmarked.

Where sideways video comes from

A phone camera sensor has a fixed orientation. When you hold the phone one way, the frames come off the sensor rotated, and rather than turning millions of pixels in real time the phone writes the frames as they are and adds a note in the container saying which way up they go. That note is honoured by phones, by browsers and by most players. It is routinely dropped by older editors, by some upload pipelines and by anything that re-muxes the file carelessly, which is why the same clip can be upright in your camera roll and on its side after a round trip through a web tool.

Rotation and mirroring are not the same operation

Rotation is a quarter turn, and every container has somewhere to record it. Mirroring is a reflection, and no format has a flag for it anywhere, which is why a mirror always re-encodes and a rotation usually does not. If you want both, this tool does them in one pass in the order the encoder uses: rotate, then flip the rotated frame. The preview does the same thing in the same order, so what you see is what you get.

What this tool will not do

  • It will not fetch a video from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram or any other platform. You have to have the file.
  • It will not repair a corrupt or partially downloaded file. If a player cannot open it, neither can this.
  • It will not add anything to the picture: no captions, no logos, no filters. It edits the file you brought.
  • Speed is your hardware. A long 4K clip on a phone will take minutes where a laptop takes seconds.

Questions, answered

Because the picture is stored sideways and the file carries a rotation flag saying how to display it. Players that read the flag show it upright; players and editors that ignore it show the raw frames. Exporting from this tool with a rotation applied gives you a file that reads correctly either way.
Not when it can be done with metadata, which is the usual case. It does when the rotation has to be painted into the frames, which happens when you also mirror the video or pick a container that cannot carry the flag. The export button tells you which one you are getting.
No. Anything other than a quarter turn leaves empty corners that have to be filled or cropped, which is an editing decision rather than a transform. Use a video editor for that.
No. The file is opened by your browser with the File API and rewritten with WebCodecs, the same video machinery your browser uses to play a video. Nothing is sent to a server, so there is no upload wait, no queue and no copy of your file sitting in someone's storage bucket.
There is no limit we impose. The practical ceiling is your machine: the file is read in small pieces rather than loaded whole, so multi-gigabyte sources open instantly, and if you turn on 'write straight to disk' the result never has to fit in memory either. On a phone, expect long clips to be slow.
None of the three. Because the work happens on your machine, this costs us nothing to run, so there is nothing to gate. You get the file you made, unmarked.
Anything current: Chrome, Edge, Safari 17 and up, and Firefox 130 and up. The tools use WebCodecs, so a very old browser will report that it cannot encode, rather than producing a broken file.
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