How to reduce photo file size for email and uploads
Modern phone photos are often 3–8 MB each. That's too big for many upload forms and quickly hits email attachment limits. The good news: you can usually make a photo 5–10 times smaller without any visible difference.
Common size limits
- Gmail: 25 MB of attachments per email.
- Outlook.com: about 20 MB per email.
- Job, visa and government forms: often 1–5 MB per file, sometimes less. Check the form's own instructions.
The two settings that matter most
1. Dimensions. A phone photo is often 4000 pixels wide, far more than any screen needs. Reducing the longest side to 1920 px cuts the file size dramatically on its own.
2. Quality. JPG quality between 70% and 80% looks almost identical to the original for most photos, at a fraction of the size.
Compress photos in your browser
- Open the image compressor.
- Keep the defaults (quality 75%, max size 1920 px) or adjust them.
- Drop in your photos. Each one shows how much smaller it got.
- Download them one by one or as a ZIP.
Your photos are processed on your device, never uploaded. If a photo is already small, the tool keeps the original instead of making it bigger.
Need an exact size?
Some forms ask for a specific width, like 600 px or 1080 px. Use the image resizer to set an exact width or height while keeping the proportions.
Which format should I use?
JPG works everywhere and is the safe choice for forms and email. WebP is even smaller and fine for websites. PNG is best for screenshots with text, but photos saved as PNG are very large.