In the age of social media, the majority of users don’t care all that much about superior image quality. Every social network and instant messenger will compress images to some extent and we learned to live with that. Honestly, it’s not that noticeable on small screens of our handheld devices. However, what if you want to share photos in their original size? Why Gmail is a solid option and does it compress photos? Learn below.
Does email compress images?
If you want to send high-quality photos over Gmail, worry not — both inline and attached images will pertain to their quality. So, to answer the big question — no, Gmail doesn’t compress photos. If anything, images are even slightly less compressed because Gmail uses Base64 encoding.
Even if you resize the image preview with inline images (the ones in the body of text when you use the web-based client), they won’t change in size or reduce quality. Compression is just not a thing with Gmail. Unlike the aforementioned instant messaging apps that will compress your photos.
Of course, there’s the 25MB data limit as a single email can’t be larger than that. This includes the body of the text so don’t be surprised if there’s an error when you attach or upload files that are exactly 25MB in size. Not to forget that only certain image file formats are supported by Gmail. Your photos need to be in one of these formats:
- .jpeg
- .jpg
- .png
- .gif
- .bmp
- and .tif.
How to send RAR or TIFF files in Gmail?
Most people will convert, say, RAW photos to JPEG or PNG before sending them but you can send RAW or TIFF as an attachment. The best way to do so is to simply put RAW or TIFF images in a RAR or ZIP archive and attach it to the email.
Doing so on a PC is a rather simple task but it’s not as simple on your Android. Luckily, we have an instructional article that covers the topic and provides step-by-step directions.
But what’s the best way to share your high-quality photos with someone besides email? The problem here is that you might have a whole gallery of high-quality photos and be limited to 25MB for an email message means that this can take a lot of time.
The best way to share your photos is to share them directly from the cloud service of your choice. That way recipients can download them in their original size with the original metadata and HASH. Services like Google Photos or Flickr have good free options but require a subscription if you have a whole lot of images to share.
That should do it. Thank you for reading and do tell us about other methods to share high-quality images with friends, family, or clients in the comments section below. We look forward to hearing from you here or on Twitter and Facebook.
Editor’s note: This article was initially published in January 2022. We made sure to revamp it for freshness and accuracy.
