How to Compress Images for Email (Stay Under the Limit)

TL;DR

Gmail won't send a message whose attachments exceed 25 MB. It strips them out and replaces them with a Google Drive link, and a handful of modern phone photos can hit that limit, so compress images before attaching them. echloe compresses a batch in your browser without uploading anything.

How big can an email attachment be?

Gmail's limit for personal accounts is 25 MB per message. Go over it and Gmail removes the attachment and inserts a Google Drive link instead. That works, but it isn't what most people expect when they "attach a photo." Outlook behaves similarly, steering large files to OneDrive. Work and school accounts can have lower limits set by an administrator.

The catch is that today's phone photos are large. Several of them, untouched, can pass 25 MB quickly. Even well under the limit, a 20 MB email is slow to send and annoying to receive.

How small should email images be?

Aim well below the cap, not just under it. A good target is a few hundred kilobytes to a couple of megabytes per image, depending on whether the recipient needs to print it or just look at it. For viewing on screen, that's plenty, and it keeps the whole message light enough to send and open instantly.

How do I compress images for email without making them ugly?

Two levers, often used together:

• Compression: re-encode at JPEG quality around 80. The file shrinks sharply and the difference is hard to see on screen.
• Resize: if the photo is far larger than it needs to be, scale it down to something like 1600 px on the long edge. A recipient reading email doesn't need a 6000 px original.

For several photos, do them as a batch:

• Drop the images into the compressor.
• Set quality to about 80 (and optionally a max dimension).
• Compress and download, then attach the smaller copies.

echloe runs locally in your browser, so the photos never upload to a server, and it's free for up to 15 images a day, which covers a typical email's worth of attachments.

Key takeaways

1. Gmail caps attachments at 25 MB and converts overflow to a Drive link; Outlook nudges large files to OneDrive.
2. Modern phone photos are large, and a few can exceed the limit untouched.
3. Compress at JPEG ~80 and resize to ~1600 px on the long edge for on-screen viewing.
4. Compressing locally keeps private photos off third-party servers.