Reduce Photo Size For Mail

Before sending photos, consider the size of the attachments and what the recipient really needs. If it makes sense, use one of these techniques to shrink the photo file size down to something more appropriate.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you different ways that you can make your Photo files smaller before sending them to somebody over email.
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Now if you're going to send somebody an email message with a photo with it, you may not want to send them the full size file. They can be quite big and if you want to send a few of them it's easy to have a huge email that they may not even be able to get because of restrictions on how big messages can be for them. 
Now the first way I'm going to show you is by using the Mail App on your Mac, which makes it really easy if you don't care about the specifics. So, for instance, I have an image here selected in the Photos App. Now let's say I want to send it by Mail. Now I can start sending it many different ways. For instance, I can Drag and Drop this into a Mail Composition window. I can click the Share button here and select Mail, for instance. Either way I do it I'm going to end up with a composition window here and then the photo is going to be in here. Now automatically Mail will compress this image.  It's not going to send the original image. If I go back to Photos and I look at this image here, get info on it. I can see it's 1.6 MB in size which isn't that bad. It's a JPEG photo. So let's see what it is in Mail. In Mail it is actually smaller. You can see it tells you here at the top Message Size is 641KB. So it is compressing the photo. If you look carefully to the right here you're going to see Image Size. You can choose Small, Medium, or Large. It's very important to pay attention to which one you choose. It's going to remember for the next time as well. So, for instance, if I choose to send a Small image, and you can see how much smaller it is, and you can see the file size in now 47KB, well the next time it's also going to send a small image which may not be good if, say, it is a screenshot you will barely be able to read the text on it. So you want to choose what is appropriate for whatever it is you're sending. Like Medium might be fine here if I just want to show somebody a photo. But if I want them to have a nice high resolution version then Large is probably best. 
But maybe this is a photo that includes them in it and I know they are going to want to save it in their Photos App and keep it. Then I might want to choose Actual Size. Here it won't compress the image at all. It's going to be 1.6 MB just like it is in Photos. So you can see here Mail gives you a really easy way to make the photo smaller. It works for multiple images as well. So, for instance, if I choose a series of 5 images here and I go to send those by Mail, then I'm going to see all five images here in the message. You can see how the total is 8.9 MB. That's actual size. If I go to Large you can see it gets much smaller, Medium even smaller than that. Now the message is something easier for the person to handle on the other end. It is just very important that you check it every time even if you don't want to use that method, Mail is always going to have Small, Medium, and Large and Actual Size there provided the image is large enough to even use Large or Medium. If you don't look carefully you may end up sending a small image when you really wanted to send, say, a large one. 
Now you may get a slightly different result if you Copy & Paste. For instance I have this image here selected. If I Copy it I'm actually not going to get as high resolution of an image as if I were to export it. So, for instance, if I now Paste this in Mail you could see that I get Actual Size, Medium, and Small. I don't actually get a Large option. The actual Size image is 451 KB. Medium will take that down to 167. So it's actually already compressing it just by doing the Copy. 
On the other hand I could Export. So when I want to export say this image here I have different options. I can go to File and then Export and I can export one photo. When I do I can pick the size. I get Small, Medium, and Large and Full Size just like before. I can also choose Custom and actually set a specific width or height or full dimensions for it. So let's go to, say, Full Size here. I can also pick Quality. So I can go to Maximum Quality, High which will be almost as good but it will compress it a bit. Medium will compress it more and Low will compress it a lot more and save you some space but you'll loose quality. So let's stick with High and Full Size. If I Export here and put it on the Desktop I'll get this one here. I'll just name it Pick 1. But let's go and export the same one and this time I'm actually going to reduce the size to, say, Large and the Quality, say, medium. So now when I export you can see I get the second picture here. Get info on this first picture and you could see it is 1.6 MB. The second one here that's only 366 KB. So now I not only have control of the size but also the quality which will allow me to compress it more. So now I can simply Drag & Drop this file into the Mail App. Watch carefully when I do this one you can see it brings it in. I still have image size Small, Medium, and Large or Actual Size. You could see Actual Size gives me the size of this photo. It is just going to actually attach this image. But if I choose one of these other ones it's going to recompress it. Actually in this case recompressing it to large size makes the file a little bit bigger so you have to watch out for that. But Small or Medium will actually make it even smaller. So there was no point to exporting a specific size unless I'm going to actually attach it Actual Size and get the compression level and size that I chose. 
Now another thing you may want to do is consider cropping a photo to save space. Like, for instance, if you want to crop this in a little bit closer you can make it much smaller. So I'm going to go in Photos to Edit and choose Crop. Then I'm going to bring the corners in and I'm going to crop it and maybe take out some of the bottom there. I can actually choose the different aspects here. So I can have it be original or I'm going to do Freeform so I can get rid of a lot of this bottom here. I can make it something, say, like this. Now it is going to actually be using less of the photo. I can click Done here and now when I go to Send this one, let's actually send it this way, you could see here the size. The actual size is smaller because there are fewer pixels involved. I cropped out a lot of the photo. Back in the Photos App you don't have to worry about the cropping being permanent because it's not. Go back into Edit and you can always Revert To Original and get back all that is there. The original is always saved. So you can basically crop it temporarily, send it over to Mail, and then Revert To Original back in the Photos App. 
Now another thing you can do is you can use Preview to take care of all of these things. So I've got this image selected here and I can go to Image and then Edit With. I can choose an external editor. So of course if you've got something like Pixelmator Pro or Affinity Photo you can actually bring the photo into there and you can crop it, you can resize, you can compress it and all of that. I'm just going to use Preview because we all have Preview. So once you bring it into Preview the first thing you might want to do is crop it. So I'm going to select an area just by dragging out a rectangle like that. I can reposition the rectangle and then I can go to Tools and then Crop. Now I've cropped it. Now I can go to Tools and Adjust Size. Here I can set the width and height and I say make this a 1000 pixels wide. Okay. Then when I go to File, Export I can now go in and actually set a Quality amount. I can see an estimate of the file size. So now I can Export this as a file after cropping, resizing, and setting a quality level. Remember since you're editing it in an external editor it's actually going to change it in the Photos App too but you can just go to image and Revert To Original and then get the original back. You can do that right afterwards or if you forget you can do it later on. So then here I've got the new image and I can look at it and you can see it is a pretty small. I can preview it and you can see it is still pretty decent. Now I can attach that to a Mail message. Like before I want to make sure that I check the image size. You can see here it doesn't even offer large as an option because there is just not enough pixels there. But if I had it set to Medium it will make it even smaller or Small will make it really tiny. So I want to make sure I use Actual Size since I've taken care of compressing it myself in Preview. 
The great thing about using Preview for this is that you can do it with images that are not even in the Photos App. So if you have images just as files you can open them up in Preview, do the crop, do the resize, Export with a different quality level and now you can send that image along in a Mail message. 
Of course the advantage of doing it in the Photos App just simply using File, Export, and then export the photos like this is that if I have several photos selected like I  had 5 here, I'm sending the quality and the size for all of them at once. So I can now export these images all at a smaller size, easily attach them all. Whereas with Preview you have to do them one-by-one. But some 3rd party apps do have batch processing available so you can resize and compress a bunch of image files at the same time.
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 12 Responses to “Reduce Photo Size For Mail”

Wm Seabrook

1 month ago

It well worth the effort to learn ImageMagick and Terminal. Amongst a host of other functions, you resize a batch of image file:

magick mogrify -path path/to/destination/folder/ -resize 50% -quality 80 *.jpg

Gene

Good video. Curious the option to set quality and/or the size of a photo- are they not proportional? If you increase the quality aren't you directly affecting the size, and vice versa? Said another way, how can you increase the quality without increasing the size?

Gary Rosenzweig

Gene: Size means physical dimensions. Like width x height. Quality is how well the image is represented in the pixels. If you compress an image more, the quality suffers. So you can have a 1200x900 image that is high quality/larger file and a 1200x900 image that is low quality/smaller file.

Norm

Thank you for excellent video. Are there any similar options for photos in "messages"?

Norm: No, which is why exporting first is important if you want control over that.

Sheldon

Thanks bunches

Joann Maier

Since I have only needed to email photos taken by me with my phone, I have been able to email photos to myself, reduce the size via Preview, and then include the reduced size in emails to whoever. Luckily that process works for my needs--though there may be a simpler? better way?

Keith Richardson

I use screen shot plus crop to rapidly create the desired image. Is there a problem with doing this?

Joann: No, that's not a good way to do it. Sync your photos to your Mac with iCloud Photos or using a cable. That also takes care of backing them up. Then use one of the techniques here in this video to reduce the size.

Keith: Yes. You are doing it a very round-about way and losing a lot of image quality. Use one of the techniques I show here in this video.

Pete OBryan

I’ve been struggling for a time about this topic and you have cleared up my confusion. Thank you.

Dave Hunter

4 weeks ago

This was another fabulous, pearl-heavy tutorial that really cleared up my confusion with the "weird" changes I had been having with sending photos in email messages. Thanks again!

Reduce Photo Size For Mail

Comments: 12 Responses to “Reduce Photo Size For Mail”

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