Why is my video mirrored, and how do I fix it?

When you look at yourself, you expect the version you see in a mirror: your parting on the familiar side, your best side where it always is. A true, unreversed picture of your own face looks slightly odd to most people, so phone makers and video-call apps reflect the live preview to match. It also makes framing easier, because moving your hand to the left moves it to the left on screen.

That preview is a courtesy to you, not a record of what the lens saw. What happens when you press record, or when the picture is sent to someone else, is a separate decision that each app makes.

Zoom

Zoom’s Mirror my video setting, under Settings → Video, changes only your own self-view. Everyone else in the meeting sees you unreversed however it’s set, and Zoom’s local and cloud recordings show you as the others saw you.

Google Meet

Meet reflects your own tile so it behaves like a mirror. The people in the call, and a Meet recording, get the true picture, so a poster on the wall behind you reads correctly for them even though it looks backwards to you.

Microsoft Teams

Teams has a Mirror my video switch in its device settings, next to the camera preview. Like Zoom’s, it affects only what you see; the people you’re talking to always get the unreversed image.

So if you hold a page up to the camera and it looks backwards to you, don’t turn it round. It already reads correctly for everyone else.

Leave it on if the self-view feels natural and you mostly glance at it to check your hair or framing. Turn it off when you’re showing something with writing on it, such as a whiteboard, a product label or a page of notes, so your view matches the audience’s and you can point at things without your hand going the wrong way. Either way, it changes nothing for anyone else.

• Phone front cameras. iPhone’s Mirror Front Camera switch (Settings → Camera) decides whether front-camera shots are saved the way the preview showed them. Many Android camera apps have a similar option, often worded as saving selfies as previewed. New shots follow the setting; videos you’ve already recorded stay as they are.
• Webcam apps that record your preview. Some recording and streaming programs save the reflected preview rather than the camera’s own picture, so the reflection ends up in the file.
• Screen recordings of a call. Capture your screen during a meeting and you capture your mirrored self-view tile along with everything else.
• Footage shot into a real mirror is reversed by nature, whatever the camera settings.

Recordings made by Zoom, Meet and Teams themselves aren’t mirrored, so a backwards clip almost always came from one of the routes above.

A horizontal flip reverses the whole frame, so it puts writing, logos and number plates right in one go. Everything else moves to the opposite side as well, which is the point: the scene goes back to how it really looked. You can’t un-mirror just the text and leave the rest; if only one sign needs to read correctly in a deliberately mirrored shot, that’s a job for an editor with masks.

Mirroring redraws every frame, so the clip is re-encoded at a high bitrate rather than copied. Set Quality to High under Export settings for the closest match to the original; rotating without losing quality explains which changes stay lossless. If the clip is sideways as well, fix both in one export with Turn left or Turn right. For top-to-bottom flips, see flip a video vertically.