When it comes to videos, there are certain limitations to sending them to someone. Mainly, because of the video size and duration.

iMessage is no exception, and there are some duration and size limitations that Apple has restricted while sending any kind of videos on iMessage.

Officially there isn’t any documentation that states the limitations of iMessage’s video sending length or size. However, sure there is a limit on the length of the video while sending it on iMessage.

Restrictions on Video length

In the recent iOS version, a few experiments and hit and trial methods proved that the maximum length of the video that you can send using iMessage is roughly around 4 minutes and 20 seconds.

Not to mention this is a big improvement from the previous year’s 3 minutes and 30 seconds. If you try to send any video which is longer than that, iMessage will prompt you to ask to trim the video before sending it.

But, the size of the video will also have some role to play while sending a video.

Restrictions on Size

Let’s discuss the restrictions on the size of the video which you can send using iMessage. Previously as per the testing and a few users from the Apple community claimed that the maximum size of the video you could send over iMessage was 100 MB.

However, in the recent versions of iOS, we tested sending a video of over 1.7GB using iMessage, and to our surprise, we were able to successfully send the video.

Do note, that if the video is greater than a certain size, then Apple will try and compress them. In certain scenarios, the compression is so high that the video becomes completely useless.

The compressed videos become so blurry and pixelated that you won’t be able to identify any faces or read any texts in the video.

The quality of the 1.75 GB video that we sent was compressed but was still usable and was very much better than the video that we sent of around 320 MB.

A lot of people have been complaining about the poor compression of the videos while sending over iMessage, but it hasn’t been resolved yet.

So, when it comes to the length of the video. Well, you can surely send any video which is shorter than 4 minutes and 20 seconds. Also, note that the shorter the video, the less you’d have to worry about the quality.

We would advise using Airdrop to send bigger files or large videos if it’s possible because that way you won’t lose any video quality and there is no size or length cap while sharing videos using Airdrop.