How to resize photos for emailing on a Samsung Galaxy S8+

[AC Question]

How do you resize your photo so you can send via email.

 

[ManiacJoe]

You need a photo editor app that does resizing.
For example, Snapseed uses a process called "exporting" to resize the file.

 

[jsigmo]

I'm looking for a GOOD resize feature, too.

In any photo editing program that I use on a desktop PC, you have the ability to "resize" an image to any pixel size you want. And you have several choices of resizing algorithms. This allows you to end up with an image that is the exact resolution you want.

I did install Snapseed and Lightroom, and neither seems to have this functionality. Snapseed allows me to choose from several different presets, and Lightroom has two. But when using full-blown Lightroom or Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, or GIMP, or whatever on my PC, I can set the resolution to be exactly what I want and get good downsampling by selecting the algorithm I prefer.

I'm using a Galaxy Note 8, and find it to be quite powerful and fast, but I'm surprised that the built-in photo editor as well as the ones I've downloaded and tried so far are missing this feature, something I use on almost every photo that I edit.

I may be missing something and need to study more, but it's also odd that when I want to text a photo to someone, there is no option to downsample (resize) the image before it sends it. When emailing, it sometimes gives me that option, but when sending an image as part of a text message, that option doesn't appear to be available. It's kind of a drag to send a 4 megabyte image file as part of a text when a properly downsampled version would be, perhaps, 60 Kilobytes, and look just fine, serving the purpose without wasting my or the recipient's precious data plan bytes.

Is this done on purpose to inflate the amount of data customers burn through? It seems like such a basic feature that I'm surprised to not find it on this new phone.

Maybe I just need to dig deeper.

Meanwhile, I'll download and try some more photo editing apps and see if I can find one that does true resizing of images. On the desktop PCs, I usually downsample the image to the desired resolution, then do sharpening after that. This is such a basic and always-used function that it seems bizarre not to find it included in any of these photo editing apps.

 

[ManiacJoe]

In Snapseed, images can be resized during the "export" process. See the settings menu for sizes.

Similarly for Photoshop Express. "Sharing" or "save to gallery" does the resizing. See the settings menu for sizes.

But, yes, is it sad that such a needed feature is either missing or restricted in the editing apps.

 

[Gayle Lynn]

When I had iPhone (6S+) the mail program would show the size for attachments and let you select small, medium, large, original and resulting size.

Probably one feature i miss that gets used a lot.

I'd look at email programs that can do it.

 

[chanchan05]

Sending via text is MMS and limited by what the carriers dictate. It surely wont send a 4mb file. Last I heard some carriers limit size to 300kb.

You can check this out:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simplemobilephotoresizer

 

[jsigmo]

Sending via text is MMS and limited by what the carriers dictate. It surely wont send a 4mb file. Last I heard some carriers limit size to 300kb.

You can check this out:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simplemobilephotoresizer

That looks promising because it at least has a "custom" setting.

I sent photos to my mom and my wife yesterday that were over 4 megs in size via texting from my Note 8. They're both on the same carrier (AT&T) as me, so it may be that there is some special way that AT&T allows transmission of oversize files, at least within their own network. But I'd have preferred to have been given the option of resizing (downsampling) the photos to something more appropriate before sending them.

It surprised me that the texting app on the phone never even gave me the option of downsampling the images.

A photo for sharing doesn't really need to be huge. The 300Kb you mentioned above would be more than adequate for most snapshots, and actually, I used to participate in an on-line bi-weekly photo contest whose rules made us keep the image file size below 200K, and I can tell you that there are a lot of fantastic and superb-looking images in the galleries from those contests.

Canon DSLR Challenge's Photo Galleries at pbase.com

And I believe that they actually changed the rules over the years and initially, we were encouraged to keep the files below 60K or so. So as you look at the earlier challenges, you might see that those images are smaller than they became as the years went on.

This challenge eventually morphed into what is now the "CIC" or Canon Image Challenge.

I will say that I learned a lot and had a lot of fun when I was participating in those challenges.

 

[chanchan05]

If your recipients both have Samsungs its possible you may have been sending via Enhanced Messaging. It's kinda like Samsung's iMessage but it's only available for higher end units. Not sure if they'll push through with it since RCS is getting close to full implementation.

 

[Rukbat]

Or if you're using any 3rd party messaging app - some of them handle MMS on their own, not using the carrier's server (which is why the carriers limit the size).

 

[Janell Peterson]

Here is an easy way around installing an app to resize a photo. Text the photo to yourself and then download the photo from your text. It will be automatically compressed in most newer android devices in order to send it via SMS. The result should be a photo well under 1 MB

 

[Rukbat]

Email is limited to 25MB. SMS (actually pictures go via MMS) is limited to 1.2MB in the best case. That's "resizing" it a lot more than is needed to email it.