Quick answer: if the picture in your landscape video is lying on its side, click Right or Left in the tool above once and export. A 1920 × 1080 file becomes 1080 × 1920, ready for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, with nothing lost in quality.
If the picture is already the right way up, rotating is the wrong move, because the whole scene would end up on its side. A clip like that needs cropping instead: you keep a tall slice of the frame and give up some of the sides. Both routes are below, and the tool can handle each one.
Use these steps when faces and text in the video appear turned by a quarter turn. That usually means the phone was held upright but saved the clip as landscape.
Drop the landscape file onto the tool, or tap to choose it from your library.
Click Right or Left (or press ] or [) once, so faces and text stand upright. The preview becomes tall.
Leave Canvas on Expand. With a quarter turn it produces an exact vertical frame, with no bars and no re-encode.
Click Export video. A 16:9 original comes out as a 9:16 MP4. On a phone, use Share or save to Photos to pass it straight to the app you post with.
Pause on a frame and look at a face, the horizon or some writing.
A landscape shot holds far more from side to side than a vertical frame can show. Going from 16:9 to 9:16 at the same height keeps only about a third of the width, so pick clips where the action stays near the middle.
The Crop and Fill canvas options always keep the shape of the file you open. To use them for this job, first turn the video into a tall frame, then turn the picture back upright inside it:
Fill and Crop differ in how much of the scene survives. Fill zooms until no bars remain, so only the central third of the width is left. Crop keeps the picture at its original scale, so a little over half of the width shows, in a band across the middle of the frame.
All three are built around a 9:16 frame, and 1080 × 1920 is the usual size to aim for. A quarter turn on a 1920 × 1080 clip lands on it exactly. A 4K landscape clip becomes 2160 × 3840; if that is larger than you need, choose 1080p under Export settings, which re-encodes the video.
Posting a landscape clip without converting it still works on most of these apps, but it plays as a narrow strip across the middle of a tall screen. YouTube also counts a video as a Short only when it's vertical or square, so a 16:9 upload goes in as a regular video.
Clips that are tall when they should be wide are covered in how to rotate a video on iPhone and how to rotate a video on Android.
If the picture is on its side, rotate it a quarter turn in the tool above and export with Expand. If the picture is upright, crop it to 9:16 with the two-pass Fill or Crop method on this page, accepting that the sides are cut.
It can. A centred 9:16 crop of a 16:9 frame shows roughly the middle third, so anyone near the edges disappears. Crop with Blur corners keeps more of the width, and an editor can follow a subject that moves.
If the people in it now lie on their side, the original was an upright landscape shot that needed cropping, not rotating. Start again from the original file and use the crop method instead.
Yes. Use Crop with Blur corners in the second pass. The band in the middle shows the upright scene, with a blurred copy of it filling the space above and below. The band is trimmed at the sides too, so it is not the complete original frame.
A quarter turn with Expand doesn’t, because only the rotation flag changes. The crop pass re-encodes, and Fill also enlarges the middle of the picture, so a 1080p source looks softer afterwards. With a 4K original, choose 1080p under Export settings in the second pass for a sharper 1080 × 1920 result.
Yes, the same ideas work in reverse. A tall clip that is on its side needs a single quarter turn with Expand. An upright tall clip can be fitted to a landscape frame with the same two passes, using Fill, or Crop with Blur corners.