'Mirror Front Camera' Explained: What Does It Mean On An iPhone?

Thanks to their great front-facing cameras, the best iPhones capture great selfies. However, you may have noticed that every time you take a selfie with an iPhone, the camera preview screen shows a picture of you with your left and right sides flipped — similar to when you look at yourself in a mirror. Normally, this isn't an issue, and you might not really even think about it. Where it becomes immediately noticeable is when you preview your selfie and happen to be wearing a t-shirt with some text written. You'll notice that while your face looks normal, the text on the t-shirt is inverted from left to right.

However, once you take the selfie, the iPhone "corrects" this anomaly. Given that the corrected photo doesn't quite match the preview, some users are occasionally taken aback by the difference.

For several years, iPhone users had no option but to be content with the "corrected" image that their iPhones automatically created. With iOS 14, though, that changed, and the company added a new option called "Mirror Front Camera."

From the 2010 launch of the iPhone 4, which added a front-facing camera to the device, until the debut of iOS 13 in 2019, Apple automatically corrected mirrored previews and did not give users the option to keep their pictures flipped. This even led to people looking for third-party iPhone camera apps that could do this for them.

It took Apple a decade to finally issue a native fix to this long-standing problem. When the company announced iOS 14 in 2020, it silently added a toggle option within the camera settings. The option simply reads "mirror front camera," and once it's enabled, the final selfie will stay mirrored, looking exactly like it looked on the preview screen before the user clicked the photo.

Now that the option to mirror pictures captured using the front camera is part of iOS, people don't need to rely on third party tools.

The default option on iPhones is to automatically "correct" the front camera mirroring effect. If you want to turn this setting off for one reason or another, though, it's pretty easy to do.

Open the "Settings" app on your iPhone, and then navigate to "Camera." Within the camera settings, look for the option that says "Mirror front camera" and activate it. Once this is done, your iPhone will stop correcting your selfies automatically and will let you capture a mirrored image of yourself so that your final images look exactly the way they appear on the preview screen.

Note that using this iPhone camera trick also affects selfie videos captured by the device. So, if you're someone who prefers capturing self-portraits in the mirrored mode but would rather record selfie videos in the corrected orientation, you'll need to toggle back and forth between the two options in your settings.