You've written the perfect email, attached your photo, and hit send—only to be blocked by an error: "Attachment too large." It's a common frustration. Modern phones take incredible, high-resolution photos, but email providers often have strict size limits that haven't kept up. The good news is that you don't have to sacrifice quality to send your images.
This guide will show you how to quickly and easily resize your images so they look great on any screen and sail through any email server, every time.
A single photo from a new smartphone can be over 5MB and 4000 pixels wide. That's fantastic for printing, but it's overkill for an email. Most email providers, like Gmail and Outlook, have attachment limits around 25MB. A handful of high-quality photos can easily exceed this limit. The key is to reduce the image's dimensions to what's needed for screen viewing, which dramatically shrinks the file size without any noticeable loss in quality.
There are two main ways to shrink an image file: resizing and compressing. For email, resizing is almost always the best option. It reduces the image dimensions (e.g., from 4000px to 1200px wide), which provides the biggest file size savings. Compression, on the other hand, keeps the dimensions the same but reduces quality.
Not sure what size to choose? Use this simple guide.
| Scenario | Recommended Width | Typical File Size |
|---|---|---|
| Sending 1-3 Photos | 1200 pixels | ~500 KB per image |
| Sending a Small Album (5-10 Photos) | 800 pixels | ~250 KB per image |
| Sending a Professional Portfolio | 1600 pixels | ~1 MB per image |
If you need to send a large number of high-resolution images without any resizing, email is not the right tool for the job. In this case, the best solution is to use a cloud storage service.
This allows your recipient to view and download the full-quality images without clogging up their inbox or getting blocked by attachment limits.
You don't need to be a tech expert to solve the "attachment too large" problem. By resizing your images to dimensions appropriate for screen viewing, you can ensure they look great, arrive instantly, and respect your recipient's inbox. Use a simple tool like the Image Resizer to make it a quick, painless part of your workflow.
