iPhone Video Too Large to Send
An iPhone records 4K60 at roughly 400 MB per minute, and every place you might send it caps out far below that: 25 MB for Gmail, 16 MB for a WhatsApp video, 10 MB for Discord. A three-minute clip is over a gigabyte. Nothing has gone wrong — the file is simply built for editing, not for sending.
Fastest fixes, in order
- Send a link instead. iCloud's Mail Drop, a shared album, or a Drive link keeps the original quality and sidesteps every limit. For long clips this is the right answer, not compression.
- Compress it. For anything up to a couple of minutes, a 1080p re-encode gets you from hundreds of megabytes to tens with no visible difference on a phone screen.
- Send it as a file, not a video. In WhatsApp, attaching as a document skips the app's own re-encode and allows up to 2 GB — at the cost of no inline preview.
Stop it happening again
In Settings → Camera → Record Video, choose 1080p at 30 fps for everyday recording. It is a quarter the size of 4K60 and indistinguishable on any phone screen. Leave 4K for the things you will actually edit.
Also check Settings → Camera → Formats. "High Efficiency" records HEVC, which is smaller — useful, but it is the reason some clips will not play on Windows PCs and older Android phones. "Most Compatible" records H.264: bigger files, no playback arguments.
Why the clip sometimes gets huge after you edit it
Trimming in Photos and exporting, or sending through AirDrop after an edit, can re-encode the footage at a higher bitrate than it needs — and slow-motion and HDR clips are routinely larger than their length suggests. If a 30-second clip is 300 MB, that is usually what happened.
Compressing on the phone or on a laptop
If the video is on the phone, compressing on the phone avoids transferring gigabytes anywhere first, and the iPhone's hardware encoder is far quicker than anything a browser tab can do. If it is already on a laptop, or you need to hit an exact size like "under 25 MB", the in-browser compressor here does that without uploading the file to anyone.
Compress a MOV file → Runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.