Compress an image for email
Most email providers cap a single message around 20–25 MB, but attachments start causing problems well before that. This page walks through the safe target sizes and links to the tool that will hit them without visibly hurting your photo.
For anyone whose email bounced back with an attachment-too-large error, or whose photo is too heavy to send from their phone.
Presets for Gmail, Outlook and iCloud attachment limits — auto-tunes quality to fit.
Step-by-step
- Open the email-ready compressor above.
- Drop in one or more photos. HEIC from an iPhone works — it will be converted automatically.
- Pick the target size (200 KB for many photos in one email, 1 MB for a single high-quality shot, 5 MB for a print-ready image).
- Wait a moment while the tool re-encodes the JPG or PNG and hits the target.
- Download the smaller file and attach it to your email normally.
Common mistakes to avoid
- •Attaching straight from the iPhone Photos app — it often sends the full-resolution HEIC which recipients on Windows can't open.
- •Zipping the photos to "make them smaller". ZIP does almost nothing to already-compressed JPGs.
- •Resizing to 640×480 to be safe. That is far too small for any modern screen — 1600–2000 px on the long edge is a much better balance.
- •Attaching 15 originals from a camera roll. Google will silently switch them to Drive links, which some corporate recipients block.
Keep photos as JPG for email — it is the most compatible and gives the smallest files at good quality. Only use PNG when the image is a screenshot, a graphic with sharp text, or needs transparency.
The compressor works entirely in your browser using the Canvas API. Your photos are never uploaded, and re-encoding also removes EXIF and GPS metadata as a side effect.