How to Crop a Video on iPhone (the Shots to Take Instead)

You typed “how do you crop a video on iPhone” for one of two different reasons, and they deserve two different answers. Maybe a clip has something at the edge you want gone, a doorframe, a bystander, too much ceiling, and you are after the native crop tool. Or you are trying to build a before and after reveal and the two photographs you have do not agree on shape, one portrait and one landscape, and cropping is genuinely part of the fix, just not on a clip. Here is the honest answer for both, starting with the tool Apple actually built.

If you mean the iPhone’s own crop tool

Open the video in Photos, tap Edit, then tap the crop icon in the toolbar, the frame-shaped button rather than the filmstrip one. Drag the corner handles inward to change what sits inside the frame, or tap the aspect ratio button and choose a preset: Square, 16:9, 3:2, 5:4 and a handful of others. A wheel beneath the frame straightens a tilted horizon. Tap the checkmark or Done to save. The edit is non-destructive, so you can reopen Edit and adjust the crop again, or tap Revert to get the original framing back.

That is the whole tool, and it only ever does one thing: it changes what is inside a single clip’s frame, in space. It does not join that clip to a second one, and it does not build a comparison between an earlier moment and a later one, because a cropped clip is still just one piece of footage, however tightly framed.

If you are holding two separate video clips, one from before a job and one from after it, and picturing them cropped to match and cut together into a reveal, this app was not built for that. There is no video picker anywhere in it, no timeline, no trimming and no transition between clips. What it takes in is two still photographs, and what it hands back is a video, a GIF or a still image built from that pair.

What most people actually want when they search this

Unlike a search for trimming or shortening a clip, where the honest answer is almost always “you do not need footage at all,” cropping genuinely does matter to a before and after pair, just not the way the search implies. It shows up in two real situations.

The first is a shape mismatch. You shot the before in portrait and the after came out landscape, because you turned the phone between visits, or one frame is a screenshot pulled from a video and inherited that clip’s wide shape while the other is a normal photo. Slider and Side by Side both assume two photographs that agree on shape, and a mismatched pair looks stretched or squeezed before you have touched a single template setting.

The second is the opposite of a problem: a single photograph that already contains both states, most often a job where a wand or a mop has passed halfway across the surface and left a clean strip beside a dirty one. Cropping that one photograph into two separate images, a left half and a right half, gives you a genuine before photograph and after photograph without a second visit. That is a real technique our pressure washing guide describes in full, and it is the one place a native crop tool does exactly what a before and after pair needs.

What you need before you start

Two photographs, shot in the same orientation. Portrait if the pair is going to Reels, TikTok or Stories, since those are 9:16 and a landscape frame gets cropped or letterboxed to fit; landscape only if you are building for a website or a wide upload. Whichever you pick, shoot both frames the same way, because reshaping one of them afterwards throws away the sides of a shot you framed carefully the first time.

If one frame already came out the wrong shape, the native crop tool from the section above is the fix, applied to the mismatched photo before either one goes into the app. Do this once, before you build anything, rather than discovering the mismatch at export.

The steps, in order

1. Take or pick the before

Bring the before photograph in however suits the job: pick it from your gallery, shoot it fresh, or if the moment already happened and all you have is a clip, pull a single frame from it with the Photos app’s scrub bar and a screenshot. A frame grab works exactly like any other photograph once it is saved, though it is worth checking it landed in the same orientation as your other frame before you go further.

2. Match the after to it

This is the step that decides whether the pair reads as honest or as two unrelated photos with a caption stretched between them. Stand in the same spot, hold the phone at the same height, keep the same distance, use the main 1x lens on both frames, and shoot under the same light. If the two frames are minutes apart, holding that in your head is enough. If they are hours or weeks apart, our free Ghost Camera mode lays the before photograph over the live viewfinder at an opacity you set, so you can line the second shot up before you press the shutter. The full method, including the five numbers worth writing down, is in how to take matching before and after photos .

3. Choose how the two photographs sit on the frame

Four comparison modes, and every one of them is free: Slider, split by a divider you can drag; Side by Side, both photographs at full height; Top / Bottom, stacked, which reads better than Side by Side on a wide subject like a driveway or a room; and Tap to Switch, one photograph at a time, flipped by a tap. Pick by the subject’s shape, not by which one looks nicest in the abstract.

4. Choose the reveal

Three reveal animations exist: Slider Reveal, an eased wipe across the frame and the one available on the free tier; Tap Reveal, a hard cut at the halfway point; and Zoom In, side by side then a slow push into one. One limit worth knowing before you pick: the video export currently follows Slider Reveal’s own layout regardless of which comparison mode you chose in step three, so a Top / Bottom or Tap to Switch pair reaches a correct still image export today, not yet a correct video export. Slider Reveal is the one to pick if you built one of those two modes and specifically want a video.

5. Set the length, the ratio and export

Video runs 3.0 to 7.0 seconds in half-second steps, defaulting to 4.0. Export as an MP4 at 9:16, 4:5, 1:1 or Original, and this is where the actual crop of the finished piece gets decided, applied to both photographs equally rather than something you set on each one separately beforehand. Original keeps your source proportions and is the export to reach for on a wide subject, since a driveway or a whole room forced into 9:16 loses its width first. The free tier covers three exports a day, each behind a short rewarded ad, with a watermark, 9:16 and 1:1 only, and no background music. Everything that actually builds the pair, all four comparison modes, every filter, all 83 stickers, the full label editor, your logo and business name, and Ghost Camera, is free and ungated regardless. The full breakdown of which ratio suits which platform is in before and after video sizes for Reels, TikTok and Shorts .

Where it usually goes wrong

Almost always upstream of the export, in the two photographs themselves. An orientation mismatch is the most common one on this particular search: one frame portrait, one landscape, and whichever ratio you export to has to crop or letterbox the odd one out, usually cutting into a side you meant to keep. The lens switching from 1x to 0.5x between frames is the second most common, and it changes the geometry of the whole shot, not just its edges. Neither is a crop problem the export ratio can rescue, because the export ratio treats both photographs the same way and cannot tell which side of a mismatched frame mattered.

The other common mistake is confusing crop with trim, which the Photos app makes easy to do because both tools live on the same Edit screen a tap apart. Crop changes what is inside the frame in space. Trim shortens a clip in time. If the actual goal was cutting a clip down to a shorter length rather than changing what is inside it, that is the filmstrip handles, and no amount of dragging the crop frame will touch it. The native trim tool is covered the same way, with the same honest redirect, in how to trim a video on iPhone , how to cut a video on iPhone and how to shorten a video on iPhone .

How to tell it worked

Before committing to a template, test whether the pair actually holds together. The free before and after slider on this site runs entirely in your browser: drop both photographs in and drag the handle. Nothing leaves your device. A pair shot from the same spot, height, distance, lens and light, in the same orientation, holds together as the handle moves across it. A mismatched pair will jump or show a seam at the edges, and you will see exactly where.

Once the pair holds, the rest is presentation rather than photography. Minimal is a plain white frame from the Clean category that gets out of the way when the change itself is the whole point, and the Social category is shaped for the vertical platforms most pairs end up on. The full template catalogue covers all of it, and the complete flow from picking the two photographs to exporting the finished file is written out in how to make a before and after video from two photos . You can read what the app does end to end, including the full free-versus-Pro split, on the app page .