Why does Mail shrink my photos and how can I stop it?

James Tallon wrote:

I am running OS 11.3.1 on my MacBookPro. When I send photos via Mac Mail, the recipient gets a much smaller photo than what I sent. I always select "actual size" when I send, but this has no effect. I take a lot of photos with a Nikon D 850 and have sent these in RAW, JPEG and TIFF format in the past with no shrinkage; and I want to do so now. What's the fix?

How are you attaching...?

If you are using the photo selection feature within Mail— don't. Drag your image to your Desktop and make the attachment from there.

Alternatively put your image(s) in a folder and compress before you attach. Control click file/folder>Compress.

I exported from Photos to desktop, then dragged to an outgoing email.

What export settings did you use?

I would ask a recipient to save the photo to their harddisk and open it with preview or another image program, if it's big there then it's their email programs view settings which is the culprit, as a sender you can't control how various other mail programs display mails

What's reduced, exactly?

The dimensions of the photographs? That's what 'actual Size' refers to.

Or the "weight" of the file -> in MB or KB?

Are these image managed by an app, like Photos, for instance?

If they are, can you describe your exact workflow?

And what turns up at the other end? A tiff or something else?