Unless you trim your video’s length, you’ve got to find a way to shrink your file before sending it along. Unless your recipient specifically needs your video at its original quality, the decent thing for you to do is to first compress the file into a smaller version for viewing. I would suggest that’s not good digital etiquette. And of course, there are other cloud solutions.īut you’re still sending over a massive file for someone else to download. Apple offers iCloud Mail Drop (5 GB file-size limit). Sure, there are ways to upload a large video file to the cloud and then create a download link to send to your recipient. And as it turned out, my clip would still have been too large to send even if it was recorded at my iPhone’s lowest quality setting of 720p. That’s way bigger than what you can text or email from an iPhone. The result was the creation of a massive 2 GB file. Unfortunately, this recording ended up running six-minutes long, and I had forgotten to reset my iPhone to shoot video at a lower quality. That happened to me recently when I was asked to capture my fifth-grade son practicing a piece of music for his piano teacher to review.įortunately, my son’s piano lessons have been proceeding just fine over the past year of Covid as a virtual learning experience, courtesy of FaceTime and two iPhones.

If you shoot a 4K video on your iPhone and then attempt to text it to someone, you’ll likely run into the problem of a file-size limit.

Here’s how I did that to a video of my son practicing the piano.

Your only hope to successfully share your video via text is to compress it into a smaller version.

How to compress imovie video for email