How to Compress Video on iPhone with Siri Shortcuts

Updated Dec 07,2018 | by Cody

People love to use their iPhone to take high-quality videos and pictures. As the video quality gets better, the video file size gets bigger. In order to save more videos on your iPhone without losing quality, you can compress videos on iPhone with a feature provided by Apple or a third party app.

When you share a great video to your friends, you may find out that most of the services like Mail, WhatsApp limits the attachment file size that you can send. Not to mention sending a large file may eat up your cellular data and bandwidth.

Not long ago, I tried to send a video to my colleague via email, but received an error “This attachment may be too large to send in email”. To solve it, I managed to find a few methods and I will share them with you here.

Siri Shortcuts is a great feature in iOS 12, but not many people are using it. Shortcuts is an iOS automation app to replace Workflow. You can free download it free AppStore and automate tasks you do regularly.

Of course, you can use the Shortcuts app to compress video on your iPhone. since it is a system level feature, available in Share Sheet, you can use it to compress video anywhere on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

Step 1. Install the Shortcuts app if you haven’t. Then grab this shortcut by open the link in Safari.

Step 2. Locate the video that you want to compress and tab on the Share button.

Step 3. From Share Sheet, select Shortcuts. If you don’t see this option, tap More to enable it.

Step 4. Wait for the process to complete. Then you will have a few options about what to do with the compressed video on your iPhone. just select one to continue.

If you simply want to save the compressed version on your iPhone, just select Save to Files. If you cannot decide what to do with it now, just select Preview. From here, you can see how it looks and tap the Share button to share, save or open it in another app. When you ever want to extract the file on iPhone , just run this shortcut again from Share Sheet. 

Shortcuts can also be used to reduce the video file size by changing the viedeo quality. Shortcuts itself provides a few video size that you choose from. If needed you can also trim the video to save some space.

Actually, when the video is passing to Shortcuts, it will be compressed and then you can choose the video size. Let me show you how it works.

 Step 1. Get this shortcut Reduce Video Size . This is a really simple one and you can create your own.

Step 2. Locate the video that you want to compress and tap Share button to run this shortcut from the Share Sheet. If the video is saved in your iPhone photos library, you can also run this Shortcut to select the video to compress.

Step 3. You can preview the video and trim the video if needed. After compressing the video, you will be prompted to choose video size. Tap on Passthrough to select your desired video size.

Step 4. When finish resizing the video, you can choose to save the video to Camera Roll, Share, open in another app.

As you can from the screenshot below, a video 246MB in size was reduced to 83.3MB.

There are, of course, other methods to reduce iPhone video size. First, you can change the camera settings so that the next video you take with your iPhone will be much smaller.

To change default video quality, just go to Settings > Camera > Record Video. From there, select a lower quality. The available choices vary depending on the device you have. Older generations of iPhone will have less choices.

If you have the Telegram app, then you can use a little trick to reduce video size using Telegram. When you try to send video via Telegram, it gives you options to choose the video compression quality before sending it.

If you are still not satisfied with these methods above, you can download a video compressing app from AppStore. You can find a few free apps like Video Compress or Video Slimmer that can help you compress video on iPhone.

 That’s how you can compress a video on iPhone. Besides all these, you can also export video to your PC with an easy iPhone file transfer software IOTransfer. On your PC, you can compress the video with a much higher level without changing its quality. After the file is compressed, transfer the file to your iPhone wirelessly. 

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