Why photos make emails heavy
Email services limit the size of a message with its attachments; Gmail, for example, allows 25 MB and turns larger files into a Drive link. A few photos straight from a phone reach that quickly, and heavy attachments open slowly on a phone.
| Photo for | Setting that works well |
|---|---|
| Looking at on a screen | 2048 px, up to 500 KB |
| Many photos in one email | 1280 px, up to 200 KB each |
| Someone who will print it | As it is, up to 2 MB |
Sending many photos
Compress each photo to about 200 KB at 1280 px, and twenty of them fit in one email of a few megabytes. For full-size originals, a link to a shared folder works better than attachments.
Quality first, then pixels
A JPG or WebP file gets smaller in two ways: a lower quality, which drops fine detail the eye hardly sees, or fewer pixels. The tool lowers the quality first, only as far as the photo still looks good, and then makes the photo smaller. Tick “Keep the dimensions” when the size in pixels must stay; then only the quality goes down.
When the photo itself is the problem
Compression makes a photo lighter, not better: it cannot fix a blurry, dark or badly framed picture. If the photo is for a CV, a profile or an application and you have no good one, a professional headshot made from a few selfies gives you one.