How to Reduce Email Attachment Size
An email that bounces back with an attachment-too-large error is a familiar annoyance, and almost always fixable in a couple of minutes once you know where the size is actually coming from.
Find out what's actually making the file large
For a PDF, the culprit is almost always embedded images — scanned pages or high-resolution photos baked into the document. For a standalone image attachment, it's usually an unnecessarily high resolution or an uncompressed format for what's fundamentally a photo. Knowing which one you're dealing with determines the fix: a PDF needs its embedded images compressed, while a photo attachment usually just needs compression or a format switch.
Compressing a PDF attachment
Running the PDF through compression re-encodes its embedded images at a lower (but still perfectly readable) quality setting, which is usually enough on its own to bring a document from well over a typical attachment limit down to a fraction of that size, especially for scanned documents where the compression opportunity is largest.
Compressing an image attachment
A photo taken on a modern phone camera is often far higher resolution than an email attachment actually needs — resizing it down to something more reasonable (it doesn't need to be print-quality to be read on a screen) combined with a moderate compression setting typically shrinks it dramatically with no noticeable quality loss at the size it'll actually be viewed.
Multiple attachments at once
If you're attaching several files and the combined total is what's pushing you over the limit, compressing each one individually first, then bundling them into a single ZIP, often gets the total down enough to send as one attachment — and has the added benefit of arriving as one tidy file instead of several separate ones.
Compress PDF and Compress Image handle the two most common oversized-attachment cases directly in your browser. If you're sending several files together, Create Archive can bundle them into one attachment after compressing.