Rotate video with Google Photos

- [Instructor] One of the great things about camera phones is that we can shoot video as well as still photos. Hey everybody, Sean Duggan here and this week, I have a quick video tip for you that's super short and super sweet. One of the more common video mistakes with camera phones is when you start filming with the phone in an upright, vertical position and then rotate it to a horizontal position while you're still filming. Since you began shooting the clip in a vertical position, that's the reference that's used for the entire video.

So even though you rotate the camera, that subsequent part of the clip is going to be presented all wrong. The default camera and photo app on many Android devices, as well as the photos app on the iPhone do not offer a way to rotate a video clip to correct for this. Google Photos, however, can help you out of this predicament. Google Photos is a free app that lets you organize and search your images, create albums, movies, animations, and even apply basic photo edits. It also backs up all of your photos for free if you choose the optimized image quality setting.

I've covered this app on previous installments of Mobile Photography Weekly, so check the list of past episodes if you want to learn more about it. I also have an entire course on Google Photos that covers the app in great detail. It should come pre-installed with the other Google apps on most Android devices, but you'll have to download it and install it for your iPhone. The rotate video feature works exactly the same whether you're on an iPhone or an Android device, as I am here. Let's take a look at this video clip here.

This is where I started out in a vertical orientation and the scene looks quite nice as a vertical, but then for some reason, I decided well, I really would rather shoot this in a horizontal and here you can see the problem this move presents. What I'm going to do is I'll tap the screen to show the edit controls, that's those three sliders down at the bottom and I'll tap on that and right off the bat, you can see there I have a button to rotate it, so simple. But, what I need to do with this clip is also trim off the front part where I had the phone in a vertical position.

So I'm going to grab the little trim marker over on the left slide of the timeline down below the main preview there and I'll just start to slide that in. Now notice that the timeline just kind of expanded there, so if you pause when you're doing this, it'll expand to give you a better view of the action and allow you to get a little bit more refined control over where you apply the trim. We'll just back off right about there, actually looks pretty good.

All right, so I've applied my trim, now I'm just going to tap the rotate button and then I'll tap save. Google Photos will save at a brand new clip with the edits that I just made. It does not replace or alter the original video. If I come back out here to the thumbnail view, you can see right up front there is a new version of that clip, it's only 14 seconds as opposed to the 24 seconds of the original clip, and it looks much better. Everything is in a horizontal orientation and it all works.

That's all there is to it, a quick and simple fix for a common camera phone video issue.