VideoCompress Guides

"Convert it to MP4" sounds like one job. It's really two different jobs that happen to produce a file with the same extension: Rewrap : move the same video and audio packets into an MP4 container. It takes seconds, the size stays the same and the picture can't get worse, because nothing is decoded. Re-encode : decode the video and compress it again as H.264. It takes longer and costs some quality, but it's the only route that makes the file smaller or changes what's inside. Which one you need depends on two questions: what codec is inside your .mov or .webm, and does the place you're sending it care about the extension, the codec or the megabytes? I ran both routes on two real files: a 130 MB iPhone-style .MOV and a 113 MB screen recording saved as .WebM. Everything ran in Chrome on videocompress.dev , a browser video tool I build (so read this with that in mind). Nothing was uploaded, and I checked every output with ffprobe . The short answer (measured) ...

Instagram's feed wants a 1:1 square. A phone or camera photo is usually 3:2 or 4:3. When you drop a landscape shot into the Instagram cropper, it doesn't pad — it hard-crops. On a real 6000×4000 photo that means a third of the pixels disappear: 1000 px off the left edge and 1000 px off the right. I measured that loss on one CC0 landscape, then padded the same file to 1080×1080 instead. The padded Instagram-ready JPEG landed at 165.6 KB from a 7.25 MB original (about 42.8× smaller), and the whole scene stayed in frame. The tool I used is SquareImage , which I make, so keep that in mind as you read. Step 1: What a hard 1:1 crop actually removes The photo is Cooking in Nature by Myles Tan (CC0 via Wikimedia Commons): 6000×4000 JPEG, 7,250,332 bytes (7.25 MB / 6.91 MiB) , classic 3:2 landscape. A center square crop keeps the short side. Height is 4000, so the kept square is 4000×4000 — that's 66.7% of the pixels. The other 33.3% is cut as 1000 px left + 1000 px right . N...

The first time I ran a small café site through PageSpeed Insights, the photos did most of the damage. The theme was fine and the plugins were fine. The problem was five pictures in one gallery block, dragged into the WordPress media library straight from the owner's phone. Together they weighed more than the rest of the site combined. Since then I go through the same short checklist before any phone photo gets near the Upload button: weigh the page, compress the batch in the browser, check the files, zoom in on one, then weigh the page again. Below is that checklist with a real run, five full-size phone photos that went from 29.1 MB to 7.1 MB . I also cover two things WordPress does with big images that most people don't expect. The compressor I use is PixSip , which I make, so keep that in mind as you read. The five photos I tested with To keep this honest I didn't use web-ready sample images. These are five unedited phone photos from Wikimedia Commons, all released as CC...

A friend AirDrops you the photos from last weekend, or a relative emails them from an iPhone, and every file ends in .HEIC . Windows Photos asks you to buy an extension, the visa form says "JPG or PNG only", and the print shop's upload page just spins. Search for a fix and you get a page of "free online HEIC converters". Nearly all of them work the same way: your photos go to their server, get converted there, and come back. For holiday snaps that may be fine. For photos of your kids, your ID or your home, with GPS coordinates baked into every file, it's worth knowing there's another way. This guide converts HEIC to JPG inside the browser tab , and instead of just claiming "no upload", I checked it: I watched the network requests and then cut the connection halfway through. That test also showed one thing to wait for before you disconnect, so I'll show you exactly what to look for. The tool is PixSip (full disclosure: I make it). The test ...

You check the file and it says 24 MB. The limit says 25 MB. The upload still fails. Or you run a compressor three times with different quality settings and get 31 MB, then 12 MB, then something that looks like it was filmed through a screen door. Both problems have the same fix: decide the final size first, aim a little under the real ceiling, and let the encoder work backward from that number. Here is how I pick the number, and then a quick run on a real clip with VidSmaller (full disclosure: it's one of the tools I make). The limit you see isn't the limit you get The number a platform publishes is rarely the number your file has to beat. Email. Attachments travel base64-encoded, which makes them roughly 37% bigger on the wire. Gmail measures the encoded message, so a 25 MB video turns into a ~34 MB message. About 18 MB of actual file is what clears it. There's a longer explainer on why Gmail's 25 MB really means about 18 . Outlook.com stops at 20 MB, and Exchange wo...