How to Compress a Video on iPhone
iOS has no built-in "compress" button. What it has are three workarounds and a settings change, and knowing which is which saves a lot of poking around in Photos.
The built-in options
- Mail Drop. Attach a large video in Mail and iOS offers to send it as an iCloud link instead. The recipient gets the original quality, nothing is compressed, and the 25 MB problem disappears. Best answer for long clips.
- Send at a lower quality in Messages. iMessage quietly re-encodes video it sends. You have no control over the settings, but it is one tap.
- Trim in Photos. Not compression, but a 20-second excerpt of a 3-minute clip is roughly a seventh of the size, and often it was only ever the 20 seconds you wanted to send.
Record smaller in the first place
Settings → Camera → Record Video — choose 1080p at 30 fps for everyday use. Against 4K60 that is about a quarter of the size, and on any phone screen you will not see the difference.
Settings → Camera → Formats — "High Efficiency" records HEVC, which is 30–40% smaller than H.264. Keep it unless you regularly send video to Windows PCs or older Android phones, where "Most Compatible" avoids playback complaints at the cost of bigger files.
Using a compressor app
An app is the right tool when the video is on the phone and you want to control the result: pick the clip, pick a quality level, get a smaller file back into your camera roll. The compression runs on the device, using the same hardware encoder the camera uses, so it is quick — far quicker than any browser tab, including this site's.
The Video Compressor app does exactly that: three presets (640 px at 1 Mbps, 1280 px at 2.5 Mbps, 1920 px at 5 Mbps), a history of what you have compressed, and nothing uploaded. It is free to try — one compression free, then a one-off upgrade.
Or do it here, on a laptop
If the file is already on a computer, or you need to hit an exact size like "under 25 MB", the compressor on this site does that in the browser with no upload and no install. AirDrop the clip across and compress it in the tab.
Compress a MOV file → Runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.