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I have a couple of videos on Google Photos. Now some of them were rotated automatically, others not.

How can I manually rotate them? I want to avoid download, rotate and re-upload!

1
  • Workaround.. download to your computer, rotate your computer copy, upload the rotated copy in google photos.
    – user124201
    May 22, 2016 at 22:51

5 Answers 5

7

Google plus is not available anymore.

Steps to rotate

  1. Open the Google Photos App on your mobile device
  2. Tap on the vide you wish to edit
  3. Tap on settings at the bottom of the screen
  4. You have the options to Stabilize or Rotate the video
  5. Tap the actions you wish to execute
  6. Save the Video and sync it back to the cloud
  7. Done
5
  • 5
    Unfortunate that this has to be done from a mobile device. Gone are the days when web apps were more full-featured than mobile apps, I suppose. Oct 2, 2019 at 22:28
  • Or google uses the CPU power of millions of devices to rotate videos instead of providing this service free of charge ;) - since video editing is not (computationally) cheap
    – Matyas
    Oct 3, 2019 at 9:39
  • 3
    CPU power is quite accessible in-browser these days. Oct 3, 2019 at 23:35
  • Indeed but I am guessing that Videoprocessing algorithms/libraries are not available in the browser
    – Matyas
    Oct 4, 2019 at 6:29
  • Ouch. Try doing this with a 3GB file on a mobile device. Not only does it take several minutes to save, it also write a whole new 3GB file to flash (more flash wear!) Why isn't it just setting a rotation bit, and why doesn't the phone set this bit to begin with???
    – Michael
    Jan 6, 2020 at 16:10
1

The old Google+ Photos can rotate video's (seems like this functionality is still missing). Simply go to https://plus.google.com/photos. It will redirect you to photos.google.com but you'll have the option to go back to Google+ Photos. Click that option, open your video and use the rotate tools on top.

Thanks to this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/3d47pk/can_google_photos_rotate_videos/

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  • 3
    Unfortunately Google+ Photos are dead now, so it does not work. Feb 29, 2016 at 18:52
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One workaround is to add rotation metadata to the original video file using ffmpeg, which can be done without having to reencode the original video. Unfortunately as you can imagine this requires the original video to be re-uploaded to Google Photos.

e.g.

  1. Rotate the video 90 degrees clockwise (https://stackoverflow.com/a/31683689/399105)

    ffmpeg -i input.m4v -map_metadata 0 -metadata:s:v rotate="90" -codec copy output.m4v
    
  2. Copy metadata (https://video.stackexchange.com/a/28599/34178)

    (Note that exiftool is smart enough not to overwrite the newly-added rotation metadata)

    exiftool -TagsFromFile input.m4v "-all:all>all:all" output.m4v
    
0

Share the video from google photos to google plus (you may have to create a collection to share it to.) Rotate it on google plus - it will rotate on photos too.

0

A hack, but if you can find the element in the middle of the page that displays the video, you can use the Chrome dev tools to apply a CSS transform to rotate it.

Locate the element using the dev tools then add this CSS:

transform: rotate(270deg);

You may need to adjust the number of degrees. Not ideal, but it works.

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  • This is rotating it locally in the browser, and not solving the user's actual problem
    – Rocky Kev
    Oct 26, 2021 at 2:59

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