Compress images for email
Phone photos are 3–8 MB each, so a handful of them hits the attachment limit and bounces. Drop them here and each comes back at roughly 500 KB — still sharp on a full screen, but ten times lighter, so a dozen photos fit in one message.
Everything happens inside this browser tab. Your photos are not uploaded to a server and are not stored anywhere — close the tab and they are gone.
Why email needs smaller images
Most mail providers cap a whole message at 20–25 MB, and that limit is measured after encoding, which inflates attachments by about a third. In practice that means five or six original phone photos is already a gamble, and the failure is annoying: the message sits in your outbox, then bounces back minutes later. At around 500 KB per photo the arithmetic becomes comfortable — twenty photos travel in a single message, they download fast on the other end even over mobile data, and they still look good opened full screen. This page compresses every photo you add to that size automatically.
Questions about emailing photos
What is the attachment size limit in Gmail and Outlook?
Gmail allows 25 MB per message and Outlook.com 20 MB, both counting the whole email after encoding, which adds roughly a third to each attachment's size on disk. Corporate mail servers are often stricter — 10 MB caps are common — and the sender's limit does not help if the recipient's server is the strict one. Keeping each photo around 500 KB puts you comfortably inside every one of these limits with room for many photos per message.
Will the photos still look good after compressing?
For viewing on a screen, yes. Around 500 KB holds a photo at high quality at the sizes screens actually show — full-screen on a laptop or phone included. The difference from the 4 MB original only becomes visible if the recipient zooms far in or prints large. If the photos are going to a printer or a designer, do not compress them; send the originals through a file-transfer or cloud-drive link instead.
Is it better to email photos as a link instead?
For large batches, yes — upload to a cloud drive and mail the link. But links have their own frictions: they can expire, land in spam filters, require the recipient to sign in, or break in corporate environments that block sharing domains. For a normal amount of photos — holiday pictures to family, defect photos to a landlord, product shots to a buyer — compressed attachments simply arrive, with nothing for the other person to click through.
Why not just let the phone's mail app resize the photos?
Some mail apps do offer a "small / medium / large" choice when you attach photos, and it works — but you cannot see what "medium" means in bytes, the options differ by app, and many desktop clients and webmail interfaces offer nothing at all. Compressing first means you know each file's exact size before you hit send, whatever you send it from, and you keep a copy of the smaller files for next time.
Does compressing remove the location data from my photos?
Yes, as a by-product. Re-encoding through the browser strips the metadata block where EXIF data lives, including GPS coordinates and the exact capture time. When emailing photos of your home, children or documents to someone you do not fully know, that is a feature. The visible image content is unchanged.