The Photos app for iOS on your iPhone and iPad allows you to crop photos easily. However it does not allow iOS users to resize photos on their iPhone or iPad. In order to scale photos on iPhone you need to download and use a third party app. Except that you can actually resize images on iPhone or iPad by sending the photos and images through email, the
Mail app on iPhone iPad has the built-in feature to resize or scale photos. Note that, we will also include more methods and tools you can choose to resize and batch resize pictures on iPhone iPad at the bottom of this article.Steps to resize photos on iPhone iPad via Mail
Tap to run the Photos app on your iPhone or iPad, then select the photo you like to scale or resize, tap on the share icon, then tap on Next, you will bring up the photo sharing options. Choose Mail from the screen, you will then open up the Mail app on iPhone with the selected photo attached, type in your own email address to send the photo to yourself, right after you tap on the Send button, you will see a screen like this: “Small” is 320×240 – may be too small “Medium” is 640×480″ – seems to be small enough “Large” is 1632×1224 – half the full size of source image “Actual” is 3264×2448 – full size without compression or resize Now you have the chance to resize the photo on iPhone or iPad through the Mail app. iPhone has this function to shrink photos attached in emails due to the large size of actual HD photos taken using your iSight camera. Without reducing the photo size, turning the bigger photos into smaller ones, it takes more bandwidth and data when you are connected to the internet using your cellular package. Once the photo sent to your own email address, open this email on iPhone and download the resized photo on to your iPhone. It is kind of weird to scale photos using the Mail app on iOS devices. But it works without any third party image editors or apps. There are a variety of apps can do this however many of them are paid apps. Using Mail app to resize your photos however are totally free, no extra app or installation required.
Update: Some iPad users found iPad will just send the photos as they are, without resizing them. Others found the Mail app on iPad can also resize photos just like using an iPhone. If you can’t resize photos in Mail on iPad, you may refer to extra tips provided by other users in the comment section below. Special thanks to @Lisa, @Ana and @Uli for their feedback on this issue.
Resize pictures on iPhone using an image editor
A professional image editor app can help you resize images easier. For example Crop-size image editor for iOS allows us to change size of a picture by percentage, preset pixel resolution, or any custom sizes. You can find more details from this tutorial to resize images on iPhone iPad.
Batch compress photos on iPhone using iZip for free
iZip is a free zip/unzip app for iPhone. You can follow these steps to zip photos and reduce file size on iPhone using this free app in just several taps.
Resize photos on iPhone via chat apps
Chat apps, like WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, are the must-have apps for all mobile phone users. To help users send media files at fast speed, they come with the ability to compress those heavy media files, such as photos and videos. In an earlier guide, we showed you how to send photos, videos in full size through WeChat. By default photos shared via these apps will be compressed. If you want to resize photos on iPhone via the chat apps, such as WhatsApp or WeChat, simply attach the photo from Camera Roll to a chat with yourself, then send the photo to yourself via WhatsApp or WeChat, after that download the compressed photo from the chat app to your iPhone.
Other easy ways to resize photos on iPad iPhone
Is there an easier way to resize photos on iPhone or iPad? You can actually get a resized photo by taking screenshot on iPhone or iPad. Again launch the Photos app on iPhone or iPad, then open the photo you like to scale, hold your iPhone or iPad in landscape or portrait mode to get the better display or result you like, then press the home button and power button at the same time to take screenshot on iPhone iPad. The photo opened in Photo app will be captured and saved as a new photo in your Camera Roll or photo library. When you see some unnecessary area in the captured photo, simply use the Crop feature in Photo app to cut them. If you like to crop your image to exact size or dimensions, you can refer to this guide: Crop photos to specific width height on iPad iPhone.
Batch resize photos on iPhone iPad
Sometimes when you have many photos want to edit, it might be really time-consuming if you choose to resize images one by one. If you like to batch resize multiple pictures in just one go, you should refer to this tutorial to batch resize multiple photos on iPhone iPad. You will be able to scale images by percentage of themselves or specify width and height by pixels or percentage. This linked solution has really made bulk image resizing and cropping easy!
Update Jan 2018: this article was originally published in 2014. In this update, the new method to change size of an image via Cropsize editor was added.
Update Apr 2019: Add the iZip app which can batch compress photos, zip photos on iPhone.