Resize Photos from iPhone by Mailing Them to Yourself

The Photos app of on the iPhone and iPad is lacking a direct resize tool for now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t resize pictures from iOS. While there are a variety of third party apps out there to complete the task, another simple option is to just rely on the photo reducing tools that come along with the sharing feature.

Resizing pictures this way works with up to five photos at a time and is done through emailing a photo, whether it’s sent to someone else or, if you simply want to resize the picture for your own use, by sending it to yourself. Admittedly, this is kind of a weird way to go about things, but it works in a pinch and natively in iOS without having to download any third party apps which for the most part are surprisingly junky.

Resize a Photo from the iPhone & iPad by Email

This relies on the Mail sending feature to change the resolution of an image sent from the iPhone or iPad, this is done by reducing the overall size to one of several options:

1. From the Photos app, select the photo(s) you want to resize then tap on the “Share” option (the little arrow icon)
2. Choose “Mail” and select the recipient, choosing your own email as the recipient if you want to just resize an image and share it with yourself
3. Tap on “Send” to bring about the resize options, choose one of the following to change the resolution of the picture as follows:

• “Small” is 320×240 – so small it’s basically useless, hard to imagine a scenario where this size would be appropriate
• “Medium” is 640×480″ – probably what ‘small’ should be
• “Large” is 1632×1224 – exactly half of the full size image, the halving applies to all iOS devices for now
• “Actual” is 3264×2448 – the full size image taken from the iPhone camera, not resized or compressed

These resolutions are from the 8MP camera that has been around on the iPhone since iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C, and with speculation that the iPhone 6 will have the same camera, will probably carry forward at least another generation of iPhones, as Apple seems to really like 8MP cameras.

If you sent the pictures to yourself, now you just need to tap and hold onto them to save them to the iPhone in their newly resized version.

Of course, cropping photos sort of also works to resize in a roundabout way if you don’t mind losing some of the imagery itself, but that’s not much of an option if you want to maintain the entire image.

Is this ideal? Obviously not, but it works if you need it to, and it gets by in a pinch while we all wait for such a resize feature to become native into the iOS Photos app. Oddly enough, the other good image editing apps like Snapseed and Afterlight also don’t allow for direct resizing either. This much-wanted feature is really lacking in most camera and photo manipulation tools in the iOS world, something the Mac is much better at thanks to the built-in Preview utility.

(Note: the Small, Medium, Large, and Actual options do not show the resolution of the image that it will be reduced/resized to. The resolutions are easily determined from sending them to yourself on a computer where you can check yourself)