How to post longer videos to your Instagram Stories

If you sometimes upload videos to your Instagram stories, you have probably run into the 15-second limitation. That means that no matter what the length of the video you’re posting to your story, Instagram will automatically crop it to a maximum duration of 15 seconds.

This is great for shorter videos, but what happens if you want to post a video that is longer than this 15-second limit?

Post long videos to Instagram story

Splitting long videos into 15-second clips

I recently ran into this problem myself when attending a soccer football game between France and Germany. I wanted to publish the French national anthem being sung by 80,000 people to my story, thinking the limit was one minute. The next day, I realized that limit was only 15 seconds and that Instagram had cropped my video by more than two-thirds.

That’s when I started looking into an app that would automatically split videos into 15-second segments that could be uploaded to an Instagram story consecutively, making it look as if it was one continual seamless clip.

There are tons of apps in the App Store that can do that. Some are free. Some are expensive. Some literally try to scam you into buying an in-app purchase, some have watermarks, and some have extreme levels of ads. None were perfect, so I decided we should create our own, which we did.

Enters Split Video… The app is free to use with limited ad support, which makes it totally bearable. It doesn’t add watermarks to your videos and works flawlessly. It’s also elegantly designed and very easy to use.

How to post videos longer than 15 seconds to Instagram Story

1) Download Split Video and launch the app.

2) Tap Select Video and choose the video you want to split. By default, the long video will be split into smaller pieces of 15 seconds each, which is ideal for Instagram Story. But if required for other projects, you can drag the slider to adjust the clip split length up to 60 seconds.

Select video to split for your Instagram story

3) Browse your library and choose a video longer than 15 seconds. Confirm this is indeed the video you want to slice by tapping Choose.

Select video to split

4) The video will then be imported into the app, which will slice it into 15-second segments. As you can see on the screenshot below, the video length is 63 seconds, and it’s being split into 5 segments (15+15+15+15+3).

5) Tap Split and Save Clips.

Make long story video on Instagram

6) The shorter clips are then saved to your library, and a confirmation message tells you the export is complete.

Make story longer than 15 seconds

7) You can now publish these 15-second clips to your Instagram story, making sure you’re doing so in the right order.

Post long Instagram stories

8) As you can see on this last screenshot, my 5 clips have been uploaded to Instagram, which now sees that story as a one-minute story.

Story longer than a minute

And that’s the trick to uploading longer videos to Instagram Stories.

How to post longer videos to Instagram Story from the official app

Instagram now lets you post longer videos straight from the app. All you need to do is select the longer video of up to 60 seconds, and Instagram will automatically divide it into small chunks of 15 seconds each. The same applies when you’re recording the clip using the Camera inside Instagram. If you need assistance, check out our guide on posting videos from your iPhone to your Instagram story.

But if the video you want to post on your Instagram Story is longer than one minute, we recommend you use the app mentioned above. Here’s why.

I wanted to post a 1-minute 9 seconds (or 69 seconds) video to Instagram Story using the official app. The app divided the video into four 15-second parts, which is 15 + 15 + 15 + 15 = 60 seconds or 1 minute only. It automatically removed 9 seconds from the clip!

Instagram app splitting 69-second video into only four parts of 15 seconds each

I cross-checked it with another video of 1 minute 20 seconds (or 80 seconds). This time too, the official Instagram app divided the video into four 15-second smaller parts, which is 15 + 15 + 15 + 15 = 60 seconds or 1 minute only. It ignored the last 20 seconds of my video! That’s because the Instagram app has a 60-second limit to the stories you upload.

Instagram app splitting 80-second video into only four parts of 15 seconds each

But if you use the Split Video app, it’ll chop your lengthy videos into 15-second clips and also keep the remaining video length (like 9 seconds or 5 seconds) as one more video clip. This allows you to post the entire video that’s over 1 minute without editing out even the tiniest portion.

Split Video app correctly dividing the video into multiple smaller parts

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