Here’s how you can resize or reduce dimensions of photos and images from your iPhone’s Photos and Files apps and consequentially reduce their file sizes. You can do that using Shortcuts scripts – simply, for free, and without installing 3rd party apps.
There are two photos and images resizing Shortcuts scripts on this page. The first is used for resizing photos and images available in the Photos app, while the second one is used for resizing of photo and image files in the Files app.
Here are the steps:
- Download and run the Resize Photos script to resize files in the Photos app or Resize Image Files script to resize files in the Files app.
- You can download the Resize Photos script by tapping on this iCloud link.
- You can download the Resize Image Files script by tapping on this iCloud link.
- If Apple’s Shortcuts app isn’t installed on your iPhone, a prompt message after tapping on the links will suggest you to install it from the App Store.
- In the Resize Photos or Resize Image Files script, select a photo or multiple photos you want to resize.
- In the width prompt box of the scripts you can type your desired photo width in number of pixels. You can leave the field empty, if you want the width to auto-resize based on height you’ll enter in the next step. If you enter the width, you can leave the height field empty to auto-resize it based on the width.
- The resized photos and images will be available in the Recents album of the Photos app if you used the Resize Photos script or in the folder you selected if you used the Resize Image Files script.
Using the auto-resize on either width or height preserves the photos’ aspect ratio and therefore prevents image distortion.
The main benefit of the resizing shortcuts is that they allow you to reduce image dimensions to make the files smaller. Smaller files save the storage space on your iPhone, if you delete the larger originals after resizing. Smaller files are also beneficial for quicker sharing via email attachments, chat messages, social media apps, and other means.
Enlarging photos using the shortcuts doesn’t make sense, since the larger photos you get will have a degraded quality.
It’s also worth noting that resizing doesn’t alter the content of the photo or image, as opposed to cropping. Cropping can reduce the file size too, but it does it by cutting off parts of the photo / image content.