How to Reduce Picture Size in Outlook

Sending digital pictures by email can result in huge message sizes which may be bounced by the sender or recipient's email server. To avoid an issue, you should reduce the size of image attachments before you send them.

While this is easy to do in any image editing program, including the Picture Manager that comes with Outlook 2003 and up, it does take a few minutes to reduce the photo and save it.

You can save a lot of time if you let Windows or Outlook reduce the file size as you attach the image instead of resizing it yourself. There are a couple ways to do this.

• Note: If the recipient will be printing the photo you may want to leave the attachment at the original file size.

Using Send to Mail Recipient in Windows Explorer

When you right click on one or more images in Windows Explorer and choose Send to > Mail Recipient, the Windows image re-size app comes up, allowing you to reduce the size of the image.

Using the Insert file command in Outlook

When you use Outlook 2010 and the Insert File command, you can re-size the image from the File tab. Outlook 2010 has only one size option, and although it's not the smallest size, it is the most popular size.

In Outlook 2007, expand the Include section (using the arrow in the lower left hand corner) to open the Attachment Options pane. In Outlook 2003, click the Attachment Option button to the right of the attachment field to display the Attachment Options pane (as seen in the screenshot below and to the right).