This isn’t really cruising related, but we thought we’d share an answer on how you can stop the iPhone camera recording video so that the video is saved before the iPhone battery dies.  So, have you been trying to record a long video on your iPhone and found that the battery died and it didn’t save the video before unceremoniously shutting down?  Unfortunately there isn’t a setting on the iPhone (at least as of iOS 26 beta 3 and before) to say something like “if the battery is about to die on my iPhone, stop the camera video and save it.” 

So the problem is: how do you stop a video on your iPhone when the battery gets low so that the iPhone will save it and it won’t just turn off abruptly, causing you to lose however many hours of video you’ve recorded on the iPhone.  The Shortcuts app doesn’t allow you to directly stop recording in the native Camera app via an automation or other means, so you can’t tie it into the battery dropping to a certain level. The short answer is: there is no way to do it in the default Apple iPhone camera, however, there is a work around using shortcuts using a different app.

This YouTube video shows how to stop the iPhone camera video recording before the battery dies using a trick. Here’s how to set it up, showing the steps in the video:

• 1. Open the “Shortcuts” app on the iPhone
• 2. Select “Automations” and hit the “+”
• 3. Scroll down to “Battery Level”
• 4. Select “When battery falls below 5%” (or 10% if you want a little buffer).  
• 5. Click “Next”
• 6. Select “Books” and select “Read Current”

Why does this work?  While there is no way to have the iPhone camera app stop video recording when the battery gets low, switching to another app (books in this case) stops the video recording which causes the video to be saved.

YouTube link to show the steps to stop the iPhone video recording before battery dies so your video isn’t lost.