How to send large files and photos by email without bouncing

You attach a few photos, hit send, and the email either bounces or never arrives. Almost every email service limits the total size of attachments, and the limit is smaller than most people expect.

Typical attachment limits

• Gmail: about 25 MB per message.
• Outlook and Hotmail: about 20 MB.
• Yahoo: about 25 MB.
• Many company servers: often only 10 MB, and sometimes 5 MB.

Remember that attachments grow by about a third when email encodes them, so a 10 MB pile of files can count as roughly 13 MB. The recipient's limit matters as much as yours.

Option 1: shrink the photos

Phone photos are huge because they are made for printing. For email and screens you rarely need more than 1600 pixels on the long side.

1. Open the EasyLife File Converter.
2. Use Resize to set a smaller width, for example 1600 pixels.
3. Use Compress to bring each photo to something like 300 to 500 KB.

Ten photos at 400 KB is only 4 MB, comfortably under any limit.

Option 2: combine into one PDF

If you are sending scans, receipts or screenshots, merge them into a single PDF with our images to PDF tool. One tidy file is easier for the recipient than twelve loose images.

Option 3: send a link instead

For truly big files such as videos or design projects, upload to a cloud drive (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox) and share a link. Check the sharing permission so the person can actually open it. "Anyone with the link can view" is usually the simplest.

Option 4: zip the files

Zipping groups many files into one and can slightly reduce size. It will not help much with photos or PDFs, which are already compressed, and some corporate filters block zip files, so use it only when you must.

Still bouncing?

Try fewer files per message, check the recipient's address for typos, or ask them to confirm their limit. For exact size control see how to compress an image to a target size.

Compress your photos now →