Resize, not just compress
Bulk resize images in Google Drive
Most people trying to shrink a folder of photos reach for quality first, make the pictures look worse, and save less than they expected. The bigger lever is the one they did not touch.
Two different jobs that get confused
Resizing changes how many pixels an image has. Compressing keeps the pixels and stores them more cheaply. They are not alternatives — they stack, and the order matters. Resize first, then compress what remains.
This is not a preference. In a measured run, a 43 MB iPhone photo came out 99.1% smaller, and almost all of that came from going 6400 pixels wide to 1600 — not from a quality trade. The file that gained the least was already close to a sensible size. The numbers are on how much images actually compress.
What size to use
| What it is for | Longest edge | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Email and chat | 1200 px | Opens instantly, still sharp on a laptop screen |
| A website or blog | 1600 px | Covers full-width images on most layouts |
| Slides and documents | 1600 px | More than a projector or a printed page uses |
| Archive you might crop later | 2400 px | Leaves room to crop without softening |
Printing is deliberately missing from that table. Print is measured in DPI against a physical size, not in pixels, and a single number would be wrong more often than right.
Longest edge or percentage?
Longest edge fixes one number and keeps the aspect ratio, so a portrait photo and a landscape one both end up the same size on their longer side. Use it when you want a consistent result — a folder of images for the same website, say.
Percentage scales everything by the same proportion, so the relative differences survive. Use it when a batch deliberately contains different sizes and you want to keep that relationship: a hero image should stay bigger than a thumbnail.
Neither crops. Nothing is stretched.
Doing a whole folder at once
- Open the app and pick a folder from Drive — everything inside comes with it, subfolders included.
- Set Resize to longest edge and type the number you want.
- Untick anything in the list you would rather leave alone.
- Choose where the results go: a new folder, alongside the originals, or your own Drive.
The work happens in your browser, so there is no upload queue and no cap on how many files go in one run. Images that would not get meaningfully smaller are skipped and reported rather than rewritten.
Questions
What is the difference between resizing and compressing?
Resizing changes how many pixels the image has. Compressing keeps the pixels and stores them more cheaply, trading some fidelity. They stack: resize first, then compress what is left. Turning quality down on a 6400-pixel-wide photo makes it look worse while still being far larger than it needs to be.
What size should I actually use?
For anything that will be looked at on a screen, 1600 pixels on the longest edge is plenty — that covers full-width images in most layouts and every projector. 1200 is fine for email. Go above 2400 only if you expect to crop in later.
Does resizing lose quality?
It removes detail you were not seeing. A 6400-pixel photo displayed in a 1600-pixel slot was already being scaled down by your screen — doing it once, properly, looks the same and weighs a fraction. What you lose is the ability to crop in hard later.
Can I resize by percentage instead of a fixed size?
Yes, and it is the right choice when a batch has wildly different dimensions and you want to preserve their relative sizes — product shots at mixed resolutions, for instance. A fixed longest edge is better when everything should end up consistent.
Will resizing stretch or crop my images?
Neither. The aspect ratio is kept and the longest edge is the one that gets fixed, so a portrait photo and a landscape one both come out at the size you asked for on their longer side. Nothing is cropped.
Related: compress images in Google Drive · shared drives and view-only access.