What SpaceTidy checks—and what you still need to check
Our implementation checks exported video playability, duration and audio-track presence. It creates a separate Photos item and preserves the source. These checks cannot judge visual quality: review a face, a fast-moving section and the soundtrack yourself. No universal compression percentage is promised.
- Choose one nonessential local video for your first comparison.
- Create the smaller copy and compare the reported sizes.
- Play both versions before making a separate choice about the original.
Choose the copy’s purpose
Decide whether the result is for a message, a presentation or a personal viewing copy. A short social clip has different requirements from footage you plan to edit. Keep a verified original for important work and memories.
Resolution is only one part of video quality. Motion, fine textures, low light, frame rate and the original encoding can all affect the result. There is no reliable universal savings percentage, and an already efficient file may not become meaningfully smaller.
Create a separate file before removing anything
A copy-first workflow lets you compare the export with its source. Keep enough free space for the temporary processing and the new output. Cloud-only footage may need to download before it can be compressed, so consider connection quality and available storage first.
Apple documents a video compression workflow using iMovie on iPhone. Export options vary by software version. Whatever tool you use, save the result separately and verify that you can locate both the source and the output.
Compare more than file size
Play the beginning, middle and end of the result. Listen to the audio and inspect speech, fast motion and important small details. Confirm the duration is what you expected. If you intend to edit later, check whether the exported format and appearance suit that workflow.
For an illustrative 500 MB source and 200 MB output, the copy is 300 MB smaller. While you keep both, they occupy a combined 700 MB of logical file data. The difference becomes potential savings only after you separately decide to remove or archive the source, subject to recovery and sync behavior.
How SpaceTidy approaches compression
SpaceTidy creates separate photo or video copies and preserves the originals. The Mac build adds these tools under Personal tools, with an original-versus-copy size graph. The shared video service checks that the output is playable, has a comparable duration and retains an audio track when the source has one.
Those checks cannot judge whether a face, a scene or a soundtrack looks and sounds right to you. Review the actual result. Public download availability is listed on the SpaceTidy download page.
Know the limits of photo compression too
JPEG output is a static image. It can alter transparency, metadata and color or HDR appearance; it is not a substitute for an original Live Photo. SpaceTidy excludes Live Photos from this JPEG compression workflow.
Avoid compressing the same file repeatedly. Keep one original and generate the version you need from that source. If your immediate problem is a full device rather than a sharing limit, compare compression with iCloud optimization and large-file review before doing work that adds another copy.
Sources & further reading
Apple menu names and options can vary by software version. These official guides explain the system behavior referenced above.
