2026-09-02
Google Business Profile video rules in 2026: 30 seconds, 75MB, 720p (and how to cut them from one phone walkthrough without re-encoding)
Most of the audiences this series has met sell somewhere: a marketplace listing, an app store page, a social feed. This one sells somewhere you can walk into. For a café, a salon, a repair shop, or a gym, the business's profile on Google Search and Google Maps is routinely the first thing a nearby customer sees — the panel with the hours, the reviews, the photos, and, if you've added one, a video. Google's own help page pins that video down with three numbers: up to 30 seconds, up to 75MB, 720p or higher. The raw material is almost always the same thing: a couple of minutes of phone walkthrough shot between customers, with about twenty-five good seconds somewhere in the middle. Here are Google's actual rules, from Google's own pages — and how to cut those seconds out on the phone's own footage, on your own machine, without re-encoding anything or uploading it anywhere before Google.
The rules, from Google's own help page
Google Business Profile's "Manage photos & videos" page is short and concrete. Videos: up to 30 seconds long, up to 75MB, resolution 720p or higher. Photos: JPG or PNG, between 10KB and 5MB, recommended 720×720 pixels with a 250×250 minimum, and "in focus and well lit" with "no significant alterations or excessive use of filters." The page sorts profile photos into three jobs — a logo, a cover photo, and general business photos — and it's equally concrete about what happens after you post: media goes through review, "it can take up to 24–48 hours" before it shows, and every item lands in one of three states — Pending, Not approved, or Live. One more thing the page says that owners sometimes learn the hard way: customers can add photos of your business too, and what you control there is a removal request, not the camera.
The same 30 seconds, from the other side of the counter
The ceiling isn't a merchant quirk. Google Maps' own help page gives customers the same shape: anyone sharing video to a place on Maps can post clips up to 30 seconds long. And Google's tips for posting media to Maps say what it wants inside those seconds: "Stable videos are the most helpful. Avoid shaky, out-of-focus, or distorted or corrupted videos" — and filters are fine only while the result is still "a clear, accurate depiction of the place." Which means whichever side of the counter you're on, the assignment is identical: thirty stable, honest seconds. Worth absorbing before you cut, because it tells you which thirty to keep — the steady pan across the room beats the walking shot, and the shot of the actual place beats the clever one.
The cut: a stream copy, aimed a little short of the ceiling
NearVid's Trim never touches an encoder: it's a lossless stream copy, the video and audio between your typed start and end copied through byte-for-byte, finished in seconds because the work is closer to a file copy than to video processing. Your phone's capture stays exactly what the phone shot — same codec, same container, same pixels — which matters here because Google's page, unlike Apple's spec sheet in the app-store post, publishes no format list at all: the three numbers are the whole published spec, and the capture your phone already makes is the safest thing to keep being. One mechanic from that same post applies with full force, though. A lossless cut can only begin on a keyframe, so the exported clip may start a moment earlier than the second you typed — and Google's 30 seconds is a cap on the file's real duration. So don't aim at 29.9: cut something like 25 seconds, check the exported clip's actual length in your player, and if it came out long, move the typed start a little later and cut again. A stream copy is cheap enough that re-cutting is a ten-second loop, not a render queue.
The 75MB gate, and the one honest way through it
Plain arithmetic first: 75MB spread over 30 seconds is a budget of roughly 20 megabits per second, which is more than most phone video modes spend — a trimmed 30-second clip usually walks through this gate without noticing it. The captures that don't fit are the heavy ones: high-frame-rate 4K modes, action-camera footage, screen recorders set generous. If your trimmed clip still lands over, that's the one point in this workflow where a re-encode is the honest answer, and NearVid's Convert to MP4 card — the browser-native WebCodecs pipeline from the WebM-won't-play post — does it without an upload: at the High preset's 4Mbps video plus roughly 128kbps of audio, 30 seconds comes out around 15MB, a fifth of the budget. Two properties matter for Google's other gate: the conversion requests no scaling, so a 1080p or 4K capture keeps its resolution and stays above the 720p floor — and the "≈" size shown next to the quality picker is a labeled estimate, so read it before you encode and check the finished file's real size after.
Photos from the same walkthrough
The photo slots — logo aside — can come from footage you already have. NearVid's frame extraction pulls the exact frame at the timestamp you type (not the nearest keyframe — the still-frame post covers picking a good one) as a JPG at the capture's own resolution. Against Google's photo window that lands well: any modern phone frame clears the 250×250 minimum by an order of magnitude, and a single-frame JPG almost always sits inside the 10KB–5MB band — though "almost always" is doing work there, so check the extracted file's size like you'd check the video's. The frame the walkthrough caught mid-service — the pour, the fresh fade, the finished repair — is frequently a better business photo than the one you'd stage, and it's also the "in focus and well lit" sort Google's page asks for, because you already rejected the blurry seconds while trimming.
What NearVid doesn't do here
The usual honesty section. NearVid doesn't resize video or images — the 720p floor and the 720×720 photo recommendation are the capture's job, and every modern phone clears both without help. It doesn't stabilize — Google's own tips ask for stable footage, and that's decided while shooting (brace the phone, walk less), not in any tool afterwards. It won't merge the three walkthrough takes into one, add music or text overlays, or auto-target a file size — there's no "fit to 75MB" button, just the labeled "≈" estimate and the finished file's actual size. It doesn't upload to Google: you post the clip from your Business Profile yourself, and the 24–48-hour review with its Pending / Not approved / Live states is entirely Google's to run. Two practical caps of NearVid's own: per-file limits are 500MB on desktop but 50MB on phones and low-memory devices — and since this footage usually lives on your phone, a multi-minute capture can exceed the on-phone cap, in which case move the file to a desktop and trim there. And the Convert to MP4 card only appears where the browser's WebCodecs H.264 support checks out; the lossless trim, the frame extraction, and everything else in this post run everywhere.
The honest summary
Per Google's own pages: a Business Profile video is at most 30 seconds, at most 75MB, and at least 720p; profile photos are JPG or PNG between 10KB and 5MB, at least 250×250; media reviews for up to 24–48 hours before going Live; customers can post their own 30-second clips to your place on Maps, and Google asks everyone for the same thing — stable, honest footage. The workflow is the one this series always lands on, with one local twist: trim the phone walkthrough losslessly on your own device, aiming a few seconds short of the ceiling because a keyframe-snapped start can lengthen the clip and 30 seconds is a hard cap; let 75MB take care of itself unless your capture is unusually heavy, in which case one WebCodecs re-encode brings 30 seconds down to roughly 15MB; and pull the business photos out of the same footage as exact frames. Nothing uploads anywhere until you hand Google the finished files yourself.