Guidance on WhatsApp Media Messages
With the Twilio API for WhatsApp, you can send images, video, text, and PDF files to create rich contextual conversations with your WhatsApp Users. This guide covers guidelines to follow when sending and receiving media messages through WhatsApp to ensure a smooth experience with your customers.
To send a WhatsApp media message, you must specify the MediaUrl parameter when making a request to the Twilio API for WhatsApp. Twilio checks the content-type header at the provided MediaUrl to validate the content type of the media file. If the content-type header does not match that of the media file, Twilio rejects the request.
When you send an outbound WhatsApp message, the total message size must be under the maximum size limit for the channel. An API request with media or a collection of media larger than the size limit will fail with an error.
For a WhatsApp message, the maximum size limit is 16MB. The size limit for images is only 5 MB.
Currently, Twilio does not support setting a filename or caption for documents that are send as media messages over WhatsApp.
The Twilio API for WhatsApp supports sending and receiving images, audio, PDF files, and video. The following formats are currently supported:
- Images: JPG, JPEG, PNG, WEBP*
- Audio: OGG**, AMR, 3GP, AAC, MPEG
- Documents: PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX
- Video: MP4 (with H.264 video codec and AAC audio)
- Contacts: vCard (.vcf)
* Note the following:
- *The
image/webpMIME type is only used for WhatsApp stickers, which have additional requirements. See support article for more details. - **WhatsApp outbound OGG is only supported when the OGG file uses the opus audio codec. These files may have the
.oggor the.opusextension.