I'm one of those (apparently few) people that are annoyed by emails showing me e.g. the location of a screw on a piece of metal with 3 pictures of 2 Megabytes each.
So as I'm trying to lead by example (uber-smug, ain't I?), when sending pictures I took with a digital camera myself I reduce those images to around 600 pixels along their larger dimension, which will do nicely in most cases and save the other party the trouble not only of downloading huge files but also of staring at a tiny irrelevant detail of the picture that happens to be in the top left corner after the image viewer has ceased up their entire screen.
The best interactive tool for the occasional view-crop-correct-resize-compress task is obviously gthumb, but when faced with a larger number of images, it's commandline-time:
mogrify -quality 82 -resize 600x600\> *.jpg
This will shrink all jpg files in the current directory to fit within a 600x600 pixel bounding box while preserving aspect ratio (so the images are not distorted as one might first think). The closing angle bracket at the end ensures that images that are smaller than the target size are not enlarged. Note that the mogrify command changes the images in place, so you may either want to make sure to have a backup of the original files, or go for find/convert instead.
For more information, here is the resize operator's official documentation.
Another little-known but very excellent feature of the ImageMagick suite is the -strip operator, which will remove all EXIF data from an image. This can be useful especially when the picture was taken on a modern smartphone which will normally embed all sorts of information in the image's metadata such as location and time of the shot, as well as the model name of the device the image was taken with. Maybe you wouldn't want to share that with everyone that should see the picture.
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