InShot for creators, or how I edit everything on my phone

People ask what I edit in far more than they ask anything else, and they are usually disappointed by the answer. There is no editing suite. There is no second monitor. There is a phone, propped against a lamp, and an app called InShot that costs less than a coffee.

I have tried the grown up options. I kept coming back to this one, because the job is almost never complicated. Trim the start, fix the crop, make it the right shape for wherever it is going, export. Doing that on the same device the photo was taken on turns out to matter more than any feature list.

What it actually is

InShot is a video and photo editor that lives on your phone or tablet. iPhone, Android, and Huawei’s app store if you are on one of those. There is a free version with ads that puts its own watermark on your exports, and a paid tier that removes both.

At the time of writing the subscription is somewhere around four dollars a month or eighteen a year, with that one off lifetime price as a third option. Prices move and they differ by country, so look in the app rather than trusting me. If you are going to use it for more than a month, the yearly one stops being a decision.

The parts I use every single day

Ratios, which is most of the job

Every platform wants a different shape and none of them are polite about it. InShot has a canvas tool with the ratios already set up: 1:1, 4:5, 9:16, 16:9, 4:3 and a pile of others, with the social platforms labelled so you are not doing maths.

This is the single biggest time saver, and it is the reason I stopped editing on a laptop. Shoot once, export three times at three shapes, done. If a photo does not fill the ratio you picked, it will blur a copy of the image behind it to fill the gap, which looks far better than black bars.

Trimming, splitting and speed

Cut the dead air off the front and back of every clip. It sounds too obvious to write down, and it is still the difference between a clip that holds someone and one that does not. InShot does split, trim and merge without any fuss, and the speed controls are good enough that you can slow a two second moment down into something worth watching.

Text and captions

You can add text, position it, time it, and it will auto caption speech for you. Auto captions are never perfect, so read them before you export. Mine once confidently captioned my accent into something I will not repeat here.

Filters, but gently

There are a lot of filters. Most of them are too much. I use a small amount of brightness and contrast and leave the rest alone, because heavy filtering ages badly and it makes skin look strange on other people’s screens. Good lighting when you shoot beats any filter afterwards.

Where it will let you down

It is a phone app, and it behaves like one. Long videos get slow, precise audio work is fiddly, and there is no proper project management if you are juggling a lot at once. If you are cutting something long and layered, this is not the tool.

It also will not save a badly lit photo. Nothing will. Move nearer a window.

Watermark your own work while you are in there

Since you are already in an editor, this is the moment to put your own mark on things. A text layer with your name or site, sitting somewhere awkward to crop, at an opacity that does not ruin the shot.

It will not stop anyone determined. It does make a stolen post less appealing to repost, it makes the source obvious when something spreads, and it gives you something concrete to point at later. Put it low and off centre rather than in a corner, because corners are the first thing to go when someone crops or when a platform makes everything round.

So, worth it?

For what most of us actually do, yes. It is cheap, it is on the device the content is already on, and it does the boring ninety percent without opening a laptop. I would rather have a simple tool I use every day than a powerful one I open twice a year and have to relearn.

If you are starting out, use the free version for a fortnight and see whether you hit the ceiling. If you do not, pay for it and stop thinking about it. If you do, you will know exactly what you need next, which is a much better position than guessing.