Tooooolbox
100% private
June 22, 2026 · 5 min read
Most email providers cap attachments at 10–25 MB, but that doesn't mean you should send anything near that limit. A 5 MB photo attachment is slow to upload, slow to download on mobile, and often gets flagged as spam. For images shared by email, the practical target is under 500 KB per image — ideally under 200 KB for casual sharing.
A modern smartphone produces photos that are 3–8 MB each and 4000–6000 pixels wide. That resolution is great for printing, but it's completely unnecessary for viewing on a screen or attaching to an email. The gap between what the camera captures and what the recipient actually needs is where almost all that wasted size comes from.
Closing that gap is simple: resize to screen-friendly dimensions and compress. Both steps take about ten seconds with the right tool.
For general email sharing — holiday photos, event pictures, casual family shots — resize to about 1200–1500 pixels wide and save as JPEG at 75–80% quality. This produces files in the 100–300 KB range that look completely sharp on any screen and download in under a second on mobile.
For professional use — sending a photo to a designer, a press release image, or a product shot — you may want slightly higher quality and dimensions, but even then 1600–2000 px at 80% quality is usually plenty, and 400–600 KB is generous.
For photographs, always use JPEG (or WebP if your email client handles it). PNG is lossless and produces files three to ten times larger than JPEG for the same photo — you'd regularly end up with 2–4 MB attachments for a single image.
Use PNG only for screenshots, logos, or diagrams where you need pixel-perfect text or transparent backgrounds. For everything else — real photos — JPEG is the right choice.
Drop the photo into our compressor, set the width to 1200 px (or 1500 px if you want a bit more detail), choose JPEG output and set quality to 75–80%. Check the output size shown in the preview — it should land somewhere between 100 KB and 300 KB for a typical outdoor or portrait photo. If it's still over 400 KB, nudge the quality down to 70% or reduce the width a little.
If you're sending several photos at once, use the batch mode: compress all of them at the same settings, download as a ZIP, and attach them in one go. Your recipients will thank you.