Compress a video for email

• A personal Gmail account can send attachments up to 25 MB. Over that, Gmail removes the attachment and adds a Google Drive link to the email instead. Source
• Outlook.com limits a whole email to 25 MB, including its text and attached files. Links to OneDrive files do not count, and a linked file can be up to 2 GB. Source
• Another Microsoft page gives 20 MB for Outlook.com and 10 MB by default for Exchange work accounts, so the Outlook button here uses the lower Outlook.com number. Source
• Yahoo Mail allows 25 MB of attached files in one message, for both sent and received email. Source
• iCloud Mail limits a message to 20 MB, or up to 5 GB with Mail Drop turned on. Source
• Mail Drop sends attachments up to 5 GB through iCloud. Each one expires after 30 days, and they do not count against your iCloud storage. Source
• Email encoding makes an attachment bigger. Microsoft puts the growth at about 33%, and says the size limit covers the encoded message. Source
• Google gives its Workspace receiving limits as measured after encoding, which it says adds about 37%. Source
• WhatsApp can send a document of up to 2 GB, which is how to send a video too long for its normal video option. Source

Most email services stop at 20 or 25 MB, and each has its own way to send something bigger. The target here is lower than the limit because of encoding, explained in the next section. Work and school accounts can differ: an administrator sets those limits, so a smaller or larger number may apply to you.

The person receiving the email has a limit too. If their service accepts less than yours, the message can bounce even though it left your outbox.

A link is usually better than a squashed video. The email stays small, the video keeps its quality, and nothing has to be compressed. Every main email service has a built-in way to do it.

• Gmail: attach the video as usual. If it is over 25 MB, Gmail uploads it to Google Drive and puts a link in the email. Check the sharing setting Gmail offers, so the person can open it.
• Outlook: upload the video to OneDrive, then choose Share and paste the link, or attach it from OneDrive in the new message. Files up to 2 GB work this way.
• Yahoo Mail: in a new message, press the attachment button and choose to share from Google Drive or Dropbox. Yahoo adds a link rather than a real attachment.
• iCloud Mail and Apple Mail: attach the video. When it is too big, Mail asks whether to use Mail Drop. The person gets a download link that lasts 30 days.
• Rescreen: a video you record in Rescreen has a link where people press play, with no download and no account on their side. Video to link has the ways to do it.

We made a one-minute 1080p test clip with fine moving detail, which is hard to compress, and ran it through this page in Chrome on a Mac. The file started at 62.5 MB. With the Gmail button it came out at 17.0 MB in 14 seconds, at 720p, on the first pass. With the iCloud Mail button, which Outlook shares, it came out at 13.2 MB. Each result was opened again and measured before the page reported it.

It needs WebCodecs, which is in current Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox on a computer. The page says so before you start if your browser cannot compress video. In our test, Chrome and Safari’s engine on a Mac each fit a one-minute 1080p clip under 18 MB; we have not tested Edge or Firefox on this page. A phone can manage a short clip, but a long video is faster on a computer.

It takes files up to 2 GB in most browsers and always makes an MP4 with H.264 video and AAC sound, which plays in every mail app. It compresses the whole video, so cut anything you do not need first with the video trimmer. It cannot keep a long video sharp at 18 MB, and it cannot promise a message will arrive, because the receiving server has the last word.