The iPhone is the poster child for the amazing capabilities of today’s powerful, handheld electronic devices. Among its popular features is its camera, which enables anyone who can point the lens and press a button on the screen to take studio-quality photographs. For many everyday purposes, iPhone photos may be too good – meaning their resolution is far greater than needed, and the files are too large to store or send.
One of the few drawbacks of the iPhone camera is that it lacks a built-in way of reducing photo resolution. Fortunately, there are a few workarounds for this issue. iPhone photo resolution can be reduced and saved through the device’s email and messaging features. An entire photo library can be compressed to save space, and there are also third-party apps that manipulate photo resolution.
Some iPhone photo resolution-reducing techniques do have limitations (particularly concerning quantity) but are effective nevertheless, and do not require purchase or installation of a third-party app. For certain applications, however, a third-party app may be the only viable solution. Read on to find out how to save an iPhone photo with a lower resolution.
How to Save an iPhone Photo to Lower Resolution
Current iPhone models feature 12-megapixel front-facing, wide-angle cameras, and “selfie” cameras ranging from 12MP to 7MP. This is a tremendous amount of photographic power in a handheld device. (Source: Apple Website) As far as the images that iPhone cameras are capable of capturing, 12 megapixels equates to an image measuring 4,032 pixels by 3,024 pixels or a JPEG file that is roughly 3 megabytes in size. (Source: Digital Arts Studio)
There are plenty of valid reasons for seeking lower resolution photos, namely:
- Higher resolution photos comprise larger data file sizes, and may take longer to upload to other sites, transfer to other applications, or share with others.
- Similarly, from an iPhone, file transfers typically take place over cellular or wi-fi networks, and depending on available network speeds, data transfers of high-resolution photos can take long periods of time.
- A library of high-resolution photos will occupy a large portion of your iPhone’s storage capacity.
- Everyday activities like sharing photos with friends and family, posting on social media, or simply documenting an event or activity, do not require high resolution.
Utilizing features that are already built into every iPhone to save photos with lower resolution involves either the mail app or the messaging app.
Saving iPhone Photos with Lower Resolution through the Mail App
The most common and widely used technique for saving iPhone photos with lower resolution is by emailing selected photos to yourself, and then saving the photos from your email inbox to your photo library. The key to this whole process is that, when emailing yourself your photos, the phone will prompt you to select the desired file size for each photo you are sending, thereby reducing it from the original size.
Here is how it works:
- From your photo library, select the photo that you want to reduce in size (you can select multiple photos per email batch).
- Press the share button (the icon looks like a square with an arrow pointing up) to bring up the sharing options.
- Select “Mail” and enter your email address in the “To:” box.
- Press the send button, and you will immediately see a pop-up message stating:
- The actual size of the email you are sending (e.g., “This message is xx MB. You can reduce message size by scaling the image to one of the sizes below”).
- You are given four options to choose from: Small, Medium, Large, and Actual Size.
- For each option, you can see the different corresponding file sizes in kilobytes (KB) or megabytes (MB).
- If you are sending multiple photos in one email, the file size options will correspond to the total size of all attached photos.
- Pressing your desired photo file size option will send your email with the attached photo(s).
- Open your email to find the attached photos, and save them to your phone (it may be advisable to assign new file names so that the reduced photos can be easily identified).
- If you no longer need the original (and full resolution) photos, delete them from your iPhone.
As straightforward as this method may be, it does have its disadvantages. This process involves multiple steps, and depending on the number of iPhone photos you want to reduce or the internet speed at your particular location, it can be a time-consuming process. If you need to reduce an entire library’s worth of photos, this may not be a viable option unless you are prepared to spend hours, if not days, and countless emails to yourself, to reduce your photos to lower resolution. (Source: iOS App Weekly)
Saving iPhone Photos with Lower Resolution through the Messaging App
Another method that utilizes your iPhone’s built-in capabilities is to use the messaging app to send lower-resolution photos to yourself. The current iPhone operating system allows photos that are attached to messages to be automatically converted to reduced sizes to make it easier and faster to send them.
To lower photo resolution with the messaging app, follow these steps:
- The first step is to program your iPhone’s messaging app to convert the attached photos to lower resolution files automatically.
- Open your device’s settings app and select “Messages,” scroll down to the bottom of the options list, and toggle “Low-Quality Image…” to the on position – you are now ready to send yourself photos via text messaging.
- Open your photo library and press “Select” and then choose the photo(s) you want to reduce (your selections will have checkmarks on them).
- When you have completed your selections, press the share button, and select the “Messages” option.
- Enter your phone number (or email address if it is linked to your phone’s messaging service) in the “To:” box and press send.
- The photos you attached will be automatically reduced and sent.
- From the message you just received, you can save these lower resolution photos back to your iPhone (again, it may be advisable to assign new file names, or save them to a new album).
- If you no longer need the original (and full resolution) photos, delete them from your iPhone.
As with the email method, saving your iPhone photos to a lower resolution in this manner does have drawbacks, as well. This technique can be just as time-consuming as emailing photos to yourself, so adjusting the resolution of hundreds or thousands of iPhone photos and waiting for potentially large message files to transmit may not be feasible.
Also, this technique automatically reduces photos for you and does not give you the option of selecting “Small,” “Medium,” or “Large” photo sizes as with the emailing technique. (Source: AppleInsider)
Compressing Your Entire Photo Library on Your iPhone
Another option that may be more appealing to those looking to reduce sizing for an entire collection of iPhone photos is to utilize Apple’s iCloud storage. In the settings app and within the “Photos” options menu, select “Optimize iPhone Stora…” and your device will store full-resolution photos on iCloud and keep “smaller, device-sized versions” on the iPhone.
A potential downside to this method is that the free iCloud storage that comes with setting up an Apple account is limited to 5 GB (gigabytes), which by today’s standards is not very much. If more cloud storage space is required, a paid subscription will be needed. (Source: Wondershare)
Using Third-Party Apps to Save iPhone Photos to Lower Resolution
If your photo resolution-reduction needs are greater than what the iPhone’s built-in capabilities can handle, your best bet is to research third-party photo editing apps, which among many features, can reduce photo resolution with great specificity.
Many of these apps are very simple to use and are designed with the not-so-tech-savvy masses in mind. Some are even free (but be prepared to be interrupted by the occasional in-app ad). (Source: Business Insider)
Conclusion
The iPhone epitomizes how smartphones have evolved into becoming an indispensable part of our everyday lives, and this includes their powerful cameras. In some ways, the iPhone camera’s capabilities are too much of a good thing. But, with a little bit of tech-savviness and some patience, iPhone photos can be saved in lower resolutions, saving precious memory space and even saving time for their users.