CompressPhotos

Compress photos for email

Files are read on this computer and written back to it. Nothing is sent.

Prepare a set of photographs for an attachment limit: one rule for all of them, and a measured total to check before you send.

Folders need a desktop browser. On a phone, pick or drop the photos themselves.

Choose a folder. One rule is applied to everything in it.Or drag a folder onto this panel. Up to 5,000 pictures or 20 GB in one job, whichever comes first. Source files are never modified and never deleted.

“Resume needs a browser that can hand a folder back to a page. In Chrome and Edge, closing the tab costs nothing. In Safari and Firefox, the record of what finished survives, but the folder has to be chosen again.”

The rule on this page starts tighter than elsewhere: the long edge capped at 2560 pixels, strong quality, capture information removed. Change any of it in the rail. The total in the headline is what the set weighs, which is the number a mail server will apply its limit to.

What this does

Sending photographs by email fails in a specific way: the message is refused, or it sits in the outbox for four minutes and then is refused. The cause is almost never one enormous file. It is eighteen ordinary ones, each five megabytes, adding up to something no mail server was going to accept.

That makes it a set problem rather than a file problem. This page applies one rule to the whole selection and then tells you what the selection weighs. You compare that against the limit you are up against and either send it or tighten the rule and run it again — the originals are untouched either way, so a second pass costs nothing but time.

Setting the rule

  • Capping the long edge is doing most of the work. A 6000-pixel photograph attached to an email is 6000 pixels of nobody's benefit.
  • Strong quality is defensible here in a way it is not for an archive: the recipient is going to look at this on a screen, once, probably on a phone.
  • Capture information starts removed on this page only. A photograph sent outside the household is the one case where the metadata is a disclosure rather than a record.
  • The skip floor is lower here, because a 200 KB screenshot in an email batch is already small enough to leave alone.

What it will open

The same formats as everywhere else on this site: JPEG, PNG and WebP, identified from their leading bytes. Anything else in the selection is counted and reported, and nothing that cannot be handled is silently dropped from the total.

Screenshots are the common surprise. A PNG screenshot of a spreadsheet is often already small, and if it is under the floor it is left exactly as it was and passed through untouched — which is the correct outcome and is stated on its row rather than hidden in the arithmetic.

Questions about long jobs

What limit should I aim at?
Most mail services stop somewhere between ten and twenty-five megabytes for the whole message, headers and encoding included. The safe reading is to treat the smaller figure as the real one, because the limit that matters is the recipient's server, not yours.
Why does this page start with the long edge capped?
Because a photograph attached to an email is going to be looked at on a screen. At 2560 pixels on the long edge it is still larger than almost any screen it will meet, and it is a third of the weight of the file the camera wrote.
Is capture information removed here?
On this page it starts switched on, because a photograph sent to a stranger carries the date, the camera and sometimes the location of the house it was taken in. Everywhere else on this site it starts off. Either way the row says what it weighed.
Can I set an exact size for each file?
Not here. Searching for the quality that lands one photograph under a stated number is a single-file instrument and it lives on compresspicture.com. This page applies one rule to the whole set and then shows you what the set actually weighs.