Compress a Video for Facebook: Feed vs Stories vs Reels Limits
Facebook is unusual among the platforms in this series because there's no single "Facebook video limit" — the cap depends entirely on where the video is going. A standard Feed video can run up to 4GB and 240 minutes long, but a Story clip is limited to 60 seconds per segment, and Reels are built for short vertical clips around 90 seconds. Treating all three the same way is the most common reason a video that works fine in one placement looks wrong or gets split up in another.
Why file size isn't the real problem here
Unlike Discord or WhatsApp, hitting Facebook's file size cap is rarely the issue —4GB is a lot of headroom for almost any consumer video. The actual friction is aspect ratio and duration: a landscape 16:9 master exported for Feed gets pillarboxed with black bars (or cropped into the center) when posted as a Story or Reel, since both are built around a 9:16 vertical frame. Compression settings don't fix that — it has to be addressed at export/recording time.
The three placements at a glance
- Feed: up to 4GB, up to 240 minutes, works with 16:9, 1:1, 4:5, or 9:16. Most forgiving placement.
- Stories: 9:16 vertical (1080×1920), 60 seconds per organic segment — longer clips auto-split into consecutive segments.
- Reels: 9:16 vertical (1080×1920), best kept short (commonly 90 seconds or under) for how the format is consumed, even though Facebook has loosened some hard duration caps on this placement.
Step-by-step
- Decide the placement first. If it's going to Stories or Reels, export or record vertically (9:16) from the start — don't crop a landscape file after the fact if you can avoid it.
- Open Shrynk and drop in your export. Shrynk adjusts quality and target size, not aspect ratio, so the frame you feed it is the frame that gets posted.
- For Feed video, the "Balanced" preset (CRF 23) keeps size reasonable without visible loss after Facebook's own re-encode. For Stories/Reels, a slightly higher CRF (24-26) is fine since these are viewed briefly and at full-screen mobile size, not paused and studied.
- For a Story over 60 seconds, trim it first — compression won't stop the auto-split, only shortening the clip will.
FAQ
Does Facebook recompress my video after upload, like Instagram does?
Yes — Facebook (which owns Instagram and shares much of the same infrastructure) runs its own re-encoding pass on every upload. Starting from an efficiently compressed file gives that pass cleaner source data to work with.
Why did my Stories video get cut into several clips?
Organic Stories cap out at 60 seconds per segment. Anything longer gets automatically split into sequential segments rather than rejected, which is why a 90-second Story sometimes plays as two separate cards.
Can I use one export for Feed, Stories, and Reels?
Not cleanly — Feed comfortably handles landscape, square, or vertical, but Stories and Reels are built around a 9:16 vertical frame. A landscape master gets pillarboxed or cropped awkwardly in either. Exporting a vertical version for Stories/Reels and a separate one for Feed avoids that.
Posting across Feed, Stories, and Reels regularly? The Shrynk desktop app batch-compresses a whole export folder to your preferred preset in one pass, for a one-time $9.