How to Make a Video Small Enough to Email or Share

Why phone videos are so big

Phones record at high resolution, often 1080p or 4K, and at a high bitrate, the amount of data used for each second of video. That keeps every detail, but it adds up quickly: a single minute of 4K video can take hundreds of megabytes.

Email is much stricter. Gmail allows attachments up to 25 MB, and Outlook.com up to about 20 MB. Messaging apps accept bigger files but often compress them heavily themselves, sometimes more than you’d like.

What makes a video smaller

Three things decide the size of a video:

1. Resolution. A 1080p video has more than twice as many pixels as the same video at 720p. Going down to 720p saves the most, and it still looks sharp on a phone or laptop screen.
2. Compression. A stronger setting keeps less detail in each frame. The difference is hard to see on a small screen, but it shows on a large TV.
3. Length. Every second adds to the size. If only part of the video matters, share just that part.

As a rough guide, fitting a video into 25 MB means averaging about 200 KB per second. That’s enough for roughly two minutes at 720p.

How to shrink a video

1. Open our video compressor and add your video.
2. Set Maximum resolution to 720p. For a very long video, try 480p.
3. Leave compression on Balanced, or choose Smallest file if it still needs to shrink.
4. Click Compress and check the new size before you send it.

The video never leaves your device, which matters for personal or work videos. If a video is already well compressed and can’t get smaller, you get the original back instead of a bigger file.

Other tips

• Wrong format? iPhone videos are MOV files, which some Windows PCs and apps can’t play. Converting MOV to MP4 fixes that.
• Only need the sound? Extracting the audio as an MP3 makes a much smaller file, handy for voice notes, interviews or music.
• Still too big? For long videos, share a link from a cloud storage service instead of an attachment.