Crop, rotate and skew photos on iPhone

If you’re traveling this summer, there’s a neat editing trick to get spectacular shots of landmarks or murals. On the iPhone, you can crop, skew and rotate a photo using the Photos app’s advanced editing tools to make adjustments you might not have thought were possible.

You can quickly fix the perspective or angle a picture was taken from, correct the fisheye distortion on an ultra-wide photo and more. You can also precisely rotate and skew the perspective, for those times when you don’t realize until it’s too late that your shot is slightly to the side or slightly off-center.

The best part is you can can fix it all directly in the Photos app. Here’s how.

How to skew, adjust perspective, rotate and crop a photo on iPhone

In the age of iPhone photography, capturing the perfect shot often requires more than simply pressing the shutter button. Whether it’s straightening a tilted horizon, cropping out distractions or adjusting the shot’s perspective to center your subject, these subtle edits can transform a good photo into a great one.

With the iPhone’s built-in Photos app, users can take advantage of a robust set of intuitive editing tools that make refining photos and videos a very straightforward endeavor. In fact, the app that started as a simple way to look at your camera roll is now a fully featured image editor.

This guide explains exactly how cropping, rotating and correcting perspective of photos works on iPhone, with step-by-step instructions.

Table of contents: How to skew, adjust perspective, rotate and crop a photo on iPhone

1. Shift the perspective
2. Rotate pictures
3. Crop to preset aspect ratios
4. More Photos features

Shift the perspective

I try to take pictures of paintings on walls or food laid out on a table straight-on, but it’s not easy getting it perfect. Luckily, you can adjust the perspective of an image after the fact.

Consider this image of a mural in a tight hallway. I didn’t have room to get a square shot of it. Tapping the horizontal adjust button, I can use the slider to change the perspective of the image as if I were standing directly in front of it.

The vertical adjust can work wonders on tall buildings shot from the ground. Take this image of the Duomo di Firenze, shot with the 0.5× lens. Using the maximum amount of correction on the image reduces much of the fish-eye distortion.

There wasn’t enough room in the plaza to capture the whole building with the 1× lens, but with the perspective adjust, it looks good.

As one last example, you can combine all three tools — rotate, horizontal and vertical adjust — to fix pictures like these. In a big crowded room in a museum, you can rarely get a great shot. The image on the left is the best I could do, holding my phone way above my head.

But with some careful editing, the image on the right looks like I had all day to set up a tripod perfectly centered in front of the image. And since I shot it in ProRAW, it’s pretty good resolution even after all those edits.

Rotate pictures on iPhone

Tap Edit and tap the Crop tool in the bottom right. Tap the Rotate button in the top-left — that’ll spin it by a full 90°.

If you only want to correct it a little bit, slide your finger along the level at the bottom. It will both rotate the image and crop it inwards, so the corners will still look perfect.

Tap Done to save your changes.

Crop the iPhone photo to preset aspect ratios

If you just need to crop in an image, you don’t need to touch any of the advanced tools — just grab the edge of the image and drag it inwards, or pinch to zoom in on the image.

However, if you need to make the image perfectly square, or crop it to 16:9 or any other preset, tap the aspect ratio button in the top right. Switch between vertical and horizontal, scroll through the list of presets and pick one. The Wallpaper preset will make sure it’s the correct aspect ratio for your Lock Screen / Home Screen, no matter what iPhone you have.

A bunch of handy tools for your photos

The Photos app is full of tricks and hidden features:

• How Photographic Styles make your iPhone photos aesthetic
• How to tag photos on iPhone with people and pets
• 3 tips to take better pictures with your iPhone
• How to use the iPhone 16 Camera Control button
• 48MP ProRAW: Take high-resolution photos
• How to use Final Cut Camera, Apple’s free pro video app for iPhone

We originally published this article on how to crop an iPhone photo on May 22, 2023. We updated it on June 4, 2025.