Two email problems, one fix
Emailing iPhone photos tends to go wrong in one of two ways:
- It doesn’t send. Full-size photos add up quickly, and you hit the attachment limit after a handful.
- It sends, but they can’t open it. The recipient is on Windows or an older mail app and sees an attachment called IMG_2231.HEIC with no preview.
Small JPGs fix both. They’re light enough to attach in bulk, and every computer, phone and webmail preview can show them.
Attachment limits
| Service | Commonly cited limit | Roughly how many 2048 px photos |
|---|---|---|
| Gmail | 25 MB | A couple of dozen |
| Outlook | 20 MB | Around twenty |
| Corporate mail servers | Often lower, varies | Check with IT |
Limits vary by account type and change over time, and the recipient’s server can have a lower one than yours. Encoding attachments for email also inflates them a little, so aim to stay well under the number. Some services will offer to send large attachments as a cloud link instead; that works, but the recipient then gets your original file, location tag and all.
Why 2048 px and quality 80
Phones shoot at 4032 × 3024 pixels or more. Nobody reading an email needs all of that. At 2048 px on the long edge, a photo fills a laptop screen and still looks crisp, while the file drops to a fraction of the size. Quality 80 trims more without any difference you’d notice on screen.
Need an exact size, such as everything under 500 KB? The Compress HEIC tools search for the best quality that fits. Need different dimensions? Resize HEIC has presets from 512 to 3840 px.
Location out, dates in
Emailed photos are files, and files keep their metadata. That GPS tag shows where the photo was taken, which for family snaps often means your home. This page removes the location by default but keeps the date and camera details, so the recipient’s photo app can still sort them by when they were taken.
Our guide on sending HEIC photos by email walks through the other ways to do it, from the phone and from a computer.
Works on the phone too
Open this page in Safari on your iPhone, pick photos from the library, and save the converted JPGs back to Photos. Then attach them from there. No computer, no uploading to a converter first.