How to send multiple images in an email

Sending Photos via email on your iPhone or iPad is a bit different than how you’d think it works. Here’s how to do it.

Having trouble adding multiple photos to an email from your Apple iPhone or iPad? It turns out the trick is to think differently. Here is how to add multiple photos to your email and send them in a single message.

Note: For this article, we’re using the Apple Mail app. Other email clients work differently, but the idea is essentially the same.

Add Multiple Photos to Send in an Email on iOS

To get started, you might think you should launch the Mail app, compose your message, and then attach your photos.

The key to emailing multiple photos with iOS is to reverse your thinking. Instead of starting with composing a new email, start by opening the Photos app.

Then tap the Share button on the lower-right corner of an iPhone or the upper-right corner of an iPad.

Then scroll through and select the photos you want to send to one or more of your contacts. You can also select a full album if you want.

Tap on all of the photos you’d like to send in an email.

Then, select the Mail app from the row of apps (or another app if you want to use one).

(Note: On the iPhone, the Share button is located on the bottom left.)

A compose email window containing your selected photos will appear within the Photos app.

Now compose your email just as you would from the Mail app. You also can choose the size of the photos being sent: Actual size, Large, Medium, or Small.

That’s it! You should now be able to send multiple photos through email on your iOS device.

3 Comments

3 Comments

1. Chris Hager

   Thanks for posting this – I can’t believe I actually had to Google that to figure it out. Actually, I tried this and it didn’t work until I started experimenting. Apparently, if you select more than 5 photos, the “Email” option isn’t available for some strange reason!

   Reply

2. Owen

   I tried it but couldn’t make it work on my ipad mini. When I tap on photos as you suggested, I don’t get the little arrow in the top right, all I get is edit????

   Owen

   Reply

3. Nate

   This is why I hate apple products. I was forced to go to apple products and they are miserable to use. I am constantly having to look up how to do things and am told that some of what my android phone did is impossible with apple. What a joke.

   Email is still one of the easiest ways to keep in touch with someone, however it wasn’t originally designed for sending large multimedia files like photos.

   Use this step-by-step guide to avoid some common problems when sending large numbers of pictures via email.

   Although instant messaging services like Whatsapp are more popular than ever, email remains the universal online communications standard.

   But it’s not great at everything – if you’ve tried before to send a large number of big file attachments, you might have run into difficulties such as message rejections, failed sending and more.
   
   This problem only becomes more difficult as camera and smartphone image file sizes continue to increase. For the purpose of this article, we’re going to assume that you have a collection of image files, probably from the memory card of your compact camera.
   
   The same suggestions can apply to any collection of images, even from iPhone/Android phones or tablets, however for a large amount of image files, we recommend transferring them to a laptop or desktop first as it makes it easier to deal with compared to using a mobile device.

   1. First, check the total size of the files you want to send

   Collect or copy all the photos you want to send into a single folder on your computer. If you only want to send specific photos out of a large batch, it’s worth creating a temporary folder and copying those photos into that folder, for easier management.
   
   Now, check the total size of the files you want to send. In Windows, you can do this by selecting all the files in the folder (you can press Ctrl-A while in the File Explorer window to select all files), then right-clicking on the selection, and choosing “Properties” (for Macs, see here for how to check the total size).
   

   • Take a note of what the combined size is (in MB or GB), because you might need this to see if it’s over the file attachment size limits for your email provider (and you can also use it for estimating the time to upload below).

   2. How long will it take to upload?

   If you’re on a slow or mobile Internet connection it’s sometimes useful to know how much time the file/attachment upload will take. We’ve made a useful little calculator to work this out, but first check your upload speed at speedtest.net for example.
   
   Now enter the total file size, and upload speed to get an upload time estimate.
   (for 1GB file size, enter 1000MB etc.)
   

   

   Upload time calculator
   
   File size: MB Your upload speed:

   Calculate

   
   

    

   
   

   Note that this is assuming that you’re connecting to an Internet mail service such as Gmail, Yahoo mail etc. – if you’re using a mail system that’s on a local network such as a corporate intranet, the upload speeds will usually be much faster.
   

   • If it looks like it’s going to take too long to upload, try the next step, which can effectively reduce the upload time.

   3. Reduce photo size if necessary

   • If you’re not sending images that will be printed at some stage, it’s rarely necessary to send them as the original, full resolution versions.
   • Even halving the photo dimensions will not usually reduce quality that much, and in many cases can even make photos look sharper (digital cameras frequently push the limits of their sensor resolution via interpolation when using the largest photo size modes).
   • This will also significantly reduce the file size (and upload times) – you can reasonably expect files to be less than half of the original size (and up to 10 times smaller if the original was saved at too high a quality).
   

   You’ll probably want to use some software that can do this automatically for multiple images:

   Note – Unless you’re familiar with the process, it’s strongly recommended to work off a copy of your original photo files when batch resizing. That way you can always get back to the originals if there is a problem with the resizing process.

   Windows – A good option for batch photo resizing is Irfanview. After installing, select “Batch conversion/rename” from the File menu. There are a lot of options here, but all that needs to be done is select the image files from the file browser in the top-right, then click on “Add” to add them to the list of images to be processed (small note – there appears to be a bug in Irfanview where the “Add” button might not work when only a single file is selected. If this happens, you can instead double-click on the file to add it to the list).
   

   
   • Now click on the “Use advanced options” checkbox, and then the “Advanced” button beside it. This will open a dialog with even more options, however, all that needs to be selected here is the “Resize” checkbox, then in the “Set new size as percentage of original” boxes, put in 50% (it will use this for both width and height).
     
   • Click OK in the Advanced settings to go back to the Batch Conversion window. Now, the only other option to point out here is “Output directory for result files”. This is where the newly resized images are placed, so change it if necessary. Now click “Start Batch” and your images will be converted.
     

   Mac – You can easily resize images using the Preview tool, see here for details. Note that you can select “percent” instead of “pixels” to get more consistently resized images.

   Chromebook – Batch image resize options are currently a bit more limited on Chromebooks, however you could try the Bulk Resize Photos free Chrome Store app.

   4. Put all the images into a single file

   If you have more than 5 or 6 photos to send, it’s going to be much easier to send them as a single archived file (e.g. ZIP file).

   To create file archives, we’re using 7-Zip (Windows) as it’s free and high performance, however there are many options available here.

   

   After installing, simply select all of the files you want to add, right-click on the group and “Add to archive..” (image above).  It will create a single “.zip” file with all of your photos in it.

   On Macs, selected the files then Control-click and select “Create Archive”. For Chromebooks, see here.
   

   If you have previously resized the images, you may have two copies of each photo (small and large), so check that you’re only selecting the smaller versions when creating the archives.
   

   Creating a .zip file won’t change the image quality or size, but it will try to compress the data within the files.
   
   Since image files are usually already compressed (unless you are using raw format photos from digital SLRs), this won’t save much space, but it’s still convenient to have all of the images contained within a single archive file.

   5. Send the photos

   

   Files can be sent as attachments within an email, but there are some restrictions – it’s similar to the way that parcels & packages in the postal system have a certain amount of capacity for items sent.

   Due to physical limitations on storage space and network bandwidth, email providers have upper limits on the maximum size of attachments that can be sent and/or received. For the most popular mail services, this is currently about 25MB per message, for both sending and receiving attachments.
   

   25MB is not all that generous in terms of photo and video files, but at the same time, it becomes more difficult to handle large files when they are embedded within emails. To solve this problem, most email providers offer an alternative of uploading your large files to their online storage services (e.g. Google Drive), and then place a link to the file in the email when it has finished uploading.
   
   Since the files themselves are not actually being sent with the email (just the link to the files is sent), this allows for much larger 100s of MB files to be shared.

   Delivery failures

   Be aware that even though Gmail etc. may let you send attachments up to 25MB within mails, some email services may have lower limits, even for incoming emails. This can be especially true if you’re sending mails to corporate or commercial email addresses, where there are often more restricted  limits in place.
   

   • If your email is over the recipient’s attachment size limit, you will in most cases receive an error message back from their mail system stating this. Note that this only means that the delivery failed to that specific addresss – if you have sent the mail to a group of other people then they most likely received it fine, and it doesn’t need to be re-sent to them.
   • In this case, you can try again but attach the file using Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive.
     

   We’ll go through the process of attaching our .zip archive file in each of Google Mail, Outlook and Yahoo mailers:

   Gmail

   
   • Start a new mail, and click on the paperclip icon to attach files.
     The attachment size limit for Gmail is 25MB, however, if your file is larger than this, it will ask you if you want to send it using Google Drive, where the file size can be up to 10GB (10000MB).
   • If you’re sending using Google Drive, it will show you the files you have currently uploaded. So click on the “Upload” tab and select the file to upload again if necessary, and click on the blue “Upload” button below.
   
   • You will need to leave the browser tab open in either case while uploading, however it will continue uploading in the background if you simply switch to another tab or window.
   • When the upload is finished, if you are attaching the file with Google Drive, it may ask you if you want to share this file with the recipient. Clicking on the default option here, “Share & Send” should be ok in most cases, it means that the person you’re sending the file to can see that file on your Google Drive storage area, but not any other files you may have there (unless you previously shared them).
     
     In this case, the recipients don’t need a Gmail or Google account to see your attachment once it’s shared, in fact they just need the link in the email. Be aware that access to your file is just like a normal attachment or image link – if the email is forwarded again, other recipients can click on and access or download the file attachment from Google Drive.
   • If you select “Send without sharing”, the recipient may have to go through a further step of requesting access to the file. This may be useful where you need to send a file link to a group of people, but you only want to grant access to someone if they then specifically request it after they click on the link. In this case, the recipient will need to login to a Google (but not necessarily Gmail) account in order to request access.

   A slightly confusing new feature in Gmail is the ability to send files stored on Google Drive as a standard “Attachment” instead of “Drive Link” (see example below).

   

   This Attachment option is largely pointless for files that are not already on Google Drive, since you can just click the paperclip icon in Gmail to upload attachments directly, however if you’re in the habit of using Google Drive to store your files (for example, Chromebook users), this might be a useful option, since normal attachments remain permanently with the email they were sent with, whereas you might delete some files on your Google Drive at some stage, which could prevent shared files from being accessible at some stage in the future.

   Outlook.com (aka Hotmail)

   
   • Create a new email, then click on the “Insert” option from the menu at the top. If your total file size is less than 25MB, select “Files as attachments” and upload the file.
   • If your files are greater than 25MB, it will prompt you to use OneDrive, which is Microsoft’s online storage service. It’s slightly less integrated with email compared to Google’s version, since one you arrive at the OneDrive page, you’ll need to select the file for uploading once again, so if you know the file is too big to be sent as an attachment, it’s better to select the “Share from OneDrive” option in Outlook when composing your mail.
   • After uploading, the file will appear on the OneDrive page, however now you have to go back to your email in Outlook.com, and select “Insert” and “Share from OneDrive”. You can then select the file to send with the email.
     

   Receiving files sent via OneDrive – Like Google Drive, you can send files to people using OneDrive, and they don’t need a OneDrive account to see them or download them.

   How do I send a lot of pictures at once?

   Best Way to Share Photos Online Privately.

   Social Media. The first thing that comes to mind is simply sharing photos online using popular Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram. ... .

   Google Photos. Google Photos is found under Google Drive. ... .

   Dropbox. ... .

   AirDrop. ... .

   FileWhopper..

   How many pictures can you send in an email at once?

   That's up to your email provider, and the limit is the total size of the email. Usually it must be under 10 MB, which is about 5 photos.

   How do I attach multiple pictures to an email in Outlook?

   Attach a file or picture from your computer in Outlook.com Reply, Forward or create a new email message or calendar event. Attach then Browse this computer. Choose the file you want to attach and select Open. To attach more than one file, hold CTRL (or Command in Mac) while selecting multiple files.