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How to Shrink Files to Send by Email
Most email providers cap attachments at around 20-25 MB. When your file is too big, you have several easy options - and the best one depends on what you are sending.
Why attachments get rejected
Email was never designed for large files. Gmail and Outlook cap attachments at around 20-25 MB, and the encoding used for attachments actually inflates the size a little, so a 24 MB file can fail even under a 25 MB limit. The fix is to reduce the real size of what you are sending or to send a link instead.
Compress images
Photos are the most common culprit. A single modern phone photo can be several megabytes, and a handful quickly exceeds the limit. Compressing images reduces their file size while keeping them perfectly usable for viewing. Converting to an efficient format like WebP or JPG can shrink them further still.
Convert to a smaller format
Sometimes the format itself is the problem. A document scanned as TIFF or a video in an old container can be enormous. Converting a TIFF to PDF, a PNG photo to JPG, or an AVI video to MP4 can dramatically cut the size before you even think about zipping.
Zip multiple files together
If you are sending lots of files, bundling them into a single ZIP archive keeps them organised and can shrink documents noticeably (though already-compressed media like JPGs and MP4s barely reduce). A ZIP also arrives as one tidy attachment instead of a dozen.
When to use a share link instead
For genuinely large files - long videos, big design files - the cleanest option is to upload once and send a link. It sidesteps attachment limits entirely and lets the recipient download at their convenience. Temporary share links also expire, which is better for privacy than an attachment that lives in an inbox forever.