How to make a photo smaller for email

A photo straight from a phone camera is often several megabytes and thousands of pixels wide. Attach a few and you hit your email provider's limit; Gmail, for example, caps attachments at 25 MB per message. Even below the limit, big attachments are slow to send and slow to open on a phone.

The good news: a photo can usually shrink to a fraction of its size with no difference anyone will notice on screen.

Two ways to make a photo smaller

Resize it. A recent phone photo is around 4,000 pixels wide. Most screens show far fewer pixels than that, so the extra detail is wasted in an email. Halving the width and height cuts the number of pixels to a quarter.

Compress it. JPG and WebP files can store the same picture with more or less detail. A little more compression makes a much smaller file, and at sensible settings the difference is hard to see.

Doing both gives the biggest saving.

Sizes that work well

Shrink a photo step by step

1. Open Compress image and add your photos.
2. Choose a compression level. Balanced suits most photos; Smaller file is for strict size limits.
3. To resize at the same time, enter a Longest side in pixels, such as 2000.
4. Select Compress images and check the before and after sizes shown for each photo.
5. Download the photos one by one, or all of them as a .zip.

If you only want to change the dimensions, use Resize image, which also takes a percentage or common preset sizes.

Both tools run in your browser, so your photos aren't uploaded anywhere. Compress image keeps your original if compression would make the file the same size or larger.

Tips

• Send iPhone photos as JPG. If your photos are HEIC files, convert them to JPG first, so everyone can open them.
• Use JPG for photos, PNG for screenshots. Photos compress much better as JPG; screenshots with text stay sharper as PNG. See PNG vs JPG.
• Many photos? Consider sharing a link to a folder instead of attaching them all.