You attach five holiday photos, hit send, and the provider bounces it: "attachment exceeds the maximum size". Today's phones shoot 12-megapixel images at 5–12MB each, so a small album easily crosses Gmail's 25MB ceiling or a stricter corporate 10MB limit.

Why Photos Are So Large Out of the Camera

Phone cameras save at maximum quality with full metadata (GPS, lens, timestamp) baked in. Almost none of that survives being viewed on a screen, and the resolution is usually double what a recipient will ever look at. That is pure headroom for compression.

The Fast Fix

  1. Open Compress Image and drop each photo to quality 75. For typical phone snaps that alone cuts 60–80% of the size with no visible difference.
  2. If you are sending many at once, also resize the long edge to around 2000px using Resize Image — more than enough for viewing, and it stacks with compression.
  3. Prefer JPEG output for photographs; save WebP only if you know the recipient's software supports it.

Attach Directly Instead of Sharing a Link

Cloud "share link" prompts exist because the files are too big. Compress first and you can attach the images directly — the recipient gets them inline, with no extra sign-in or download step. And because compression happens in your browser, the photos are never uploaded to a third-party optimizer along the way.

One Note on Keeping an Original

Compression here creates a new, smaller copy — your original file is untouched. If a photo is precious, keep the full-resolution version and only email the compressed one.