How to send a long video on WhatsApp

Three ways to get a long video through WhatsApp without it turning into a blurry mess.

Updated November 2026 · by the Clipabay team

WhatsApp is great for quick clips, but long videos are a different story. WhatsApp shrinks the videos you send from your gallery, often down to 720p or lower, and it may ask you to trim a long one first. Here are the ways around that, from the easiest to the best quality.

Option 1: send it as a document (best quality)

WhatsApp leaves documents alone, so a video sent as a document arrives exactly as you filmed it, up to 2 GB per file.

1. In the chat, tap the attach button (+ on iPhone, the paper clip on Android).
2. Choose Document, then find the video in your files.
3. Send it. The other person taps it to download and play it.

The catch: it doesn't play inside the chat, and a 1 GB file takes a long time to send and download on mobile data.

Option 2: make the video smaller yourself (best balance)

If you shrink the video before you send it, you decide how it looks instead of WhatsApp. A 3-minute video at 720p is a few dozen megabytes and looks clean on a phone screen.

Open the video compressor

1. Open the compressor on your phone or computer and choose your video. Nothing is uploaded.
2. Choose A quality, then Balanced, and set the picture size to 720p.
3. Press Save video, then send the MP4 in WhatsApp as a normal video, or as a document to keep it exactly like that.

Option 3: split it into parts

For a long recording, such as a school play or a talk, you can cut it into a few shorter videos with the video cutter and send them one after another.

Sending a status?

Status videos are much shorter than chat videos. Cut out the best part with the video cutter, or turn a long landscape video into a tall clip with long video to shorts.

Related: compress a video for email and compress a video for Discord.

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