In December 2018 Mailchimp changed to a new image editor also called the photo editor). In my Mailchimp classes I get many people asking how to use the image editor to resize images.
The video below gives instructions on how to resize images automatically in the Mailchimp image editor.
Note: I have separate instructions available about how to crop images in Mailchimp.
Video Transcript
Hi. I’m Gary from organicwebcomau.wpcomstaging.com. I’m a Mailchimp partner and I deliver Mailchimp training and provide these videos to try and help people use Mailchimp more effectively. If you have a particular issue with Mailchimp or something you’d like answered please leave a comment on this video and I’ll try and create a video for you.
Now Robin asked me recently how images may be resized in Mailchimp. We can crop images in the Mailchimp image editor and we can resize them. In this video I’ll cover resizing and in a separate video I’ll show you how to crop images in Mailchimp.
So let’s go into Mailchimp itself. I’m in Mailchimp and I’m in the campaign editor, the email campaign editor. So there are two places we can resize images. I’ll show you the the easy way; so I’m going to add an image content block, I’ll click “browse” to add an image. I have an image from Wikipedia of my hometown, Brisbane Australia, and we can see that this image is three thousand one hundred and eighty four pixels wide. In other words it’ll be very slow to load for recipients. So Mailchimp says to us “This image is so big it may obliterate inboxes. Images should be around 800 to 1200 pixels wide. So if we click “let’s fix it” what we will notice is that Mailchimp will automatically reduce the size for us. In other words it’s changed the size to a 1200 pixels wide so we don’t need to change it any further, we merely click “Save”. So we just click “let’s fix it” and then click “Save” and Mailchimp did the work for us. So I’ll click “Save” and close. What I’ll do is I’ll now go into the content studio where our images are stored in Mailchimp and I’ll show you how we can reduce the size there. What we will notice if I click on my image and then click “view details” is that Mailchimp has kept the original. The very large file and the smaller one but let’s go to the original large one and I’m going to click “Edit image”. So what I can do is here, I can reduce the size. So all I need to do is manually change the size; so for example if I wanted 800 pixels wide I merely type in 800 and just make sure that the “lock pixels” is checked. We then click “Save” and it’s resized for us. It’s that simple. We’ll see it’s now 800 pixels wide and Mailchimp has kept a version of all the changes I’ve made. And that’s how easy it is to resize images in Mailchimp.
Thanks for joining me.
Hello Gary, this is better because now it is at least possible to edit an image. However, it is not as flexible as I remember image editing being before. I want to insert an image at the top left of my newsletter, i.e. with text to the right of the image. I used the image caption block, but it limits the width of the text to either “half” or “two thirds” of the space. For my purpose I need something about in between – half makes the image too big, two thirds too small.
It used to be possible to simply drag the outline of the picture to get the balance of text/image that I wanted, which was much more intuitive, and also worked. Now I have no way to get it right.
The other way to achieve what you want is to add the image into a text content block. The problem however is that the image may well distort in certain email reader when this means of adding an image is used.
Thanks for the reply, Gary. That’s a concern too if the image might not be predictable. It is very time consuming to fight these kind of bugs, so my recourse is not to use images, which is a bummer.
Hi Gary,
thank you for all the helpful videos on mailchimp!
I have 0 experience with HTML
and I just tried creating my first template with the drag&drop tool on mailchimp.
It works great.
But my logo is a bit too large and now I cant resize it without turning it into a pixelated mess.
Is there any way how to make image smaller, without loosing the quality?
If I resize it in Adobe illustrator and then upload it to the template, it is already super pixelated.
also is there any way to increase the width/height of the placeholder of an image?
It seems like no matter how big the images are, mailchimp imports them into pre set borders?
I would really appreciate some help.
Hi Mike,
In reply:
In relation to your images looking pixelated, is it possible that the image dimensions have been, at some time, increased as this would cause pixelation?
Hi Gary,
Thank you for the reply! Very helpful.
Regarding the border got it.
As for the logo
I kind of want it smaller than 600px but when I import a logo image which is 400px in width it looks super pixelated.
is there any way to work around it?
The best thing to do is, for example, add a transparent or colour background to your logo that is at least 600px wide. Adding images that are less than 600px wide unfortunately results in the issues you are experiencing.