What Size Should a Photo Be for Email and Social Media?
Straight answers in pixels — with the file sizes measured, so you know what each choice costs. Spoiler: the answer is almost always "much smaller than your camera produces".
The Answer Table
| Use case | Width (px) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Email inline / attachment for viewing | 800 | Fits any mail client pane; measured ≈52 KB at Q70. |
| Social media timeline photo | 1080–1200 | Measured ≈104 KB at 1200px, Q70. |
| Blog / product page image | 800–1200 | Match your content column; 1.5–2× CSS width covers retina. |
| Full-screen desktop viewing | 1600–1920 | ≈191 KB at 1600px, Q70. |
| Archival / future reprinting | Keep the original | Downscaling discards pixels permanently. Resize a copy. |
Why Width Beats the Quality Slider
From our resizing study — mean file size of the same 10 photos at quality 70:
| Width | 1600px | 1200px | 800px | 400px |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean size (Q70) | 191 KB | 104 KB | 52 KB | 16 KB |
File size tracks pixel count almost exactly — an email photo at 800px is 3.7× cheaper than the same photo at 1600px, at a fidelity you won't distinguish in a mail client. No quality setting recovers that gap.
One honest exception: if someone might view the image full-screen (a wallpaper, a photo someone may want to zoom), a larger file displayed small does have slightly better fidelity — browsers suppress compression artifacts when they shrink images for display. You pay for every visitor to download pixels most can't see, though. For email and social feeds, resize.
Step by Step (90 seconds)
- Open the Resize tool, drop in your photo (it stays on your device).
- Enter the target width from the table — keep "maintain aspect ratio" on.
- Then run it through compression at quality 60–70.
- Sending to someone who might print it? Tell them you also kept the original, or send both.
Bonus: re-encoding in the browser also strips EXIF metadata (see our EXIF guide) — your photo's GPS history doesn't ride along.