MMS Messages
Media may appear differently for each person receiving a message, depending on their device. Carriers and devices may shrink or enlarge media to accommodate screen sizes. We recommend testing your video messages on a variety of test numbers to better understand how your texts will send!
Upload Media to Broadcast
- Once you navigate to Broadcasts from your Messaging home screen, and are in your broadcast (new or draft), find the Compose Message section. The first sub-section under Compose Message is MMS Media (Optional). This is where you will upload your media!
- To upload new media, click Upload Media. This will open a new window. We support uploading .jpeg, .png, .gif, and .mp4. To upload your file, click Choose File.
- After you choose your file, click upload.
- To use media you’ve previously uploaded, click Saved Media.
- This will open up a window of all of your previously used saved media. Here, select one of the images/videos/gifs and then Select.
- After you select your media, from either option, you will see it appear in your example message preview.
- If you decide you do not want to use that image, you can click the red x next to the name of your media under MMS Media (Optional).
Images
Best Sizing and Format for Images:
For best results, we recommend using a 375 x 375 (square) aspect ratio.
- If you want a landscape or portrait format, we recommend the following aspect ratios:
375 x 500(portrait) or 500 x 375 (landscape)- Note - it’s possible the image will get cropped once sent, so you should include margin or spacing along the border. Also, most devices default to portrait orientation, so landscape images may look distorted
Videos and GIFs
Best Sizing and Format for Videos:
For best results, we recommend a video with a 480 x 480 (square) aspect ratio
- All content will be included in the image; however, for best results, avoid putting any critical content within 40px of the edge of the frame.
- If you want a landscape or portrait format, we recommend the following aspect ratios:
480 x 640or480 x 720- Note - it’s possible this format of video gets cropped once sent
General Formatting + Sizing Tips:
- Best to keep aspect ratios consistent for all of your videos to save you time formatting videos for all of your future sends
- We recommend 30 FPS (frames per second) for videos, but anything divisible by 15 is the bare minimum requirement for best results
- Switchboard caps all MP4 uploads to 20MB
- All videos have something called “Content of Interest” — this is content within your media (like a face or name) that should be as centered as possible - just in case any part of your video gets cropped by carriers
- For GIFs, we recommend converting to a video format, removing every other frame, and setting the frame delay to 0.8 seconds.
How long should my video be?
Videos under 10 seconds will perform best because longer videos will likely require extra compression which may reduce their quality (i.e. blurry).
