You attach a few photos from your phone, hit send, and get “attachment too large”, or the email bounces later. Phone photos are big, and email was never designed for big files. Here’s how to get photos small enough to send without making them look bad.
How big is too big?
Most email services limit the total size of one message, including all attachments:
| Service | Typical limit per email |
|---|---|
| Gmail | 25 MB (bigger files become a Drive link) |
| Outlook.com | 20 MB |
| Many work and school accounts | 10–25 MB, sometimes less |
| Some recipients’ inboxes | As low as 10 MB |
The limit you hit is usually the smaller of yours and your recipient’s. And attachments grow by about a third when sent, because email encodes them as text. So a 20 MB set of photos can count as 27 MB.
A modern phone photo is 2–5 MB. Five photos can already be too much. Twenty definitely are.
How small should a photo be?
It depends on what the person will do with it:
| Purpose | Good size per photo | How |
|---|---|---|
| Looking at it on a phone or laptop | 100–300 KB | Resize to about 1600–2048 px, or KB size |
| A form or application | Whatever the form says, often 50–200 KB | KB size with the exact limit |
| Printing | Keep the original, or 1–2 MB | Compress Light; don’t shrink the pixels |
| Many photos for a quick look | ~100 KB each | Bulk resize to a KB size |
For just looking, nobody can tell the difference between a 4 MB original and a 250 KB version on a screen.
Way 1: compress, same pixels
Image compressor keeps the width and height and makes the file smaller. Phone photos usually shrink by 60–80% on Balanced with no visible change.
- Open Image compressor. Balanced is already selected.
- Drop your photo, tap Repixel it ✨.
- Check the before → after sizes and download.
For a smaller file still, tick Also shrink to max 2048 px. That reduces pixels you’d never see on a screen and usually gets a phone photo to 300–600 KB. The compressor never makes a file bigger: if a photo is already efficient, it keeps the original and tells you.
Way 2: aim for an exact size
If you know your limit, like “keep each photo under 100 KB so I can send 30 of them”, use KB size.
- Open Resize image to 100 KB, or any KB page.
- Drop the photo and tap Repixel it ✨.
- The badge shows the exact bytes, like 98,410 bytes, max 100,000.
The studio finds the best quality that fits and reduces the pixel size only if needed, keeping the same shape.
Way 3: many photos at once
For a whole set, from a holiday, an event or a property viewing, use Bulk resize.
- On the left, choose KB size and type, say, 200, or choose Compress → Balanced.
- Drop the photos in, up to 10 per batch. For more, download the ZIP, tap Clear and do the next 10.
- Tap Repixel it ✨, then Download all as ZIP.
Then attach the ZIP, or the individual photos. Ten photos at 200 KB each come to about 2 MB, well within every email limit.
Which format?
- JPG for photos. It’s the smallest common format and opens everywhere. If your photos are iPhone HEIC files, they’re converted to JPG automatically.
- PNG only for screenshots or graphics with text, where sharp edges matter.
- WebP is smaller still, but some email programs and older computers can’t open it, so stick with JPG for email.
Tips to avoid problems
- Check the total. Add up the sizes before sending. Keep emails under about 15 MB to be safe with any recipient.
- Don’t screenshot photos to shrink them. Screenshots are often bigger, lose quality, and come out as PNG.
- Don’t zip big originals and hope. Photos are already compressed; zipping them barely reduces the size.
- For prints, send a link instead. If someone needs full-quality originals for printing, a shared folder link is better than shrinking.
- Privacy: compressing in the browser means the photos never leave your device. Nothing is uploaded to us, which matters for ID documents and family photos.
Why phone photos are so big
A 12-megapixel phone photo has about 12 million pixels, and the camera saves them at very high quality so you can crop and zoom later. That detail is useful for editing and printing, but an email reader looks at the photo on a screen that is perhaps 1,500 to 2,500 pixels wide. Everything beyond that is invisible to them and only makes the email heavy. That’s why shrinking the pixels to around 2048 on the long side, or compressing at Balanced, saves so much space without anyone noticing.
On a phone
All three ways work in your phone’s browser. Open the page in Chrome or Safari, tap the canvas to pick photos from your gallery, and download the results. On Android they go to Downloads; on iPhone to the Files app. From there you can attach them in Gmail, Outlook or your work mail app.
Quick answer
One or two photos: Image compressor, Balanced, done. A specific limit: Resize image to 100 KB. A set of photos: Bulk resize with KB size 200, 10 at a time, then attach the ZIP.