Taking a decent selfie is difficult enough, but when you tap the shutter button and check the finished article you’ll notice one more issue: the photo has been flipped, mirror-image-style, from the composition you lined up.
If that’s an irritation you’d like to solve, you’ve come to the right place. In this article we explain why the phone is flipping your selfies, how to take a selfie that doesn’t get flipped, and how to flip or unflip any iPhone 18 Pro Max photo.
Why do selfies get flipped?
This may blow your mind, but the truth is that selfies don’t really get flipped when you take the shot: they get unflipped.
Before selfies came along, most of the sights we’d get of our own faces would be in mirrors and other reflective surfaces – surfaces that produce reflections with left and right reversed. Tech designers often choose to imitate pre-digital experiences in order to make their products more intuitive to use, and so it was with the cameraphone: when you switch to the front-facing camera, your iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max shows you a mirror image, because that’s what you expect to see.
Once you press the shutter, however, it is felt that mirroring is no longer necessary or desirable. The final photo will be returned to the correct, unflipped composition, because that is what the camera ‘saw’. That final image is what you really looked like at the moment the photo was taken.
It’s a bit of a fudge, but on the whole this is probably the best way of organising things. If the viewfinder showed an unflipped image, we’d all find it strange (waving your left hand would move the hand on the other side of the screen, for instance). But it would similarly be strange if the finished photo remained flipped – all the photos other people took of you would have your hair parted on one side, but all your selfies would show it parted on the other.
As broadly logical as it is, however, many people don’t like the current system.
Fortunately iOS added an easy way to flip (or unflip) an iPhone selfie, so we can easily fix the problem.
Flipping an iPhone 18 Pro Max selfie
Open the Photos app and select the selfie. Tap Edit, then tap the little crop tool (two intersecting right angles).
At this point Photos is likely to apply some minor reframing edits automatically; they will probably improve the shot but if not, tap the yellow AUTO button at the top to remove them. Finally, tap the Flip button – the triangles. This will flip the selfie. Tap it again to unflip.
There you go: it’s as simple as that.
How to take a selfie that doesn’t get flipped
To take a selfie that captures the shot as you see it in the front-facing camera frame, rather than reversing it, go to Settings > Camera, then turn on Mirror Front Camera.
