Sending great photos by email can be a hassle
Taking photos is easier than ever, but sharing them may not be
Sending an email message is a process that most people have mastered and taking digital photos is a snap with a digital camera or smartphone. Yet when you combine photos and email some complicated problems can arise.
Sharing photos by posting them on Facebook or Instagram is not an option if the person you want to share the photos with doesn’t have a social media account and you’ll have to resort to email. The problem is that a photo taken with a mobile device can have a file size over 3 megabytes and a digital camera’s photos can be over 7 megabytes. Sending five photos by email would be a gigantic file attachment and if you or the recipient use a smartphone with a limited data plan it could go over the monthly data limit and incur extra charges.
Luckily, emailing photos with large files sizes is relatively easy with a tablet or a smartphone. To share a photo on an Android device you open the photo gallery, select one or more pictures, tap “share”, and pick the email program. On an iPad or iPhone you open Photos, select some pics, tap the Share button which looks like a little square with an arrow coming out the top, and then the email application. There are instructions at the Wikihow site (https://tinyurl.com/ ycr9cvxg).
Your smartphone will usually display a popup asking if you want to reduce the file size to small or medium, which you should do. You may not get this option in Gmail in which case only send photos when connected to wi-fi.
On a laptop or desktop Windows computer, sending a photo attachment in an email may or may not be simple, depending on how you get your email.
If you use an email program such as Thunderbird, Outlook, Windows Mail, or Outlook Express, sending an attachment is relatively easy. Look in the default Pictures folder and find the folder containing the photos you want to email. Left click a photo to select it or hold down the Ctrl key, click on several pictures, and release the Ctrl key when finished.
Next, right click on one selected photo and in the menu click on Send To and then Mail Recipient. You’ll be asked to choose a picture size; medium should be suitable. Click on continue and your photos will be automatically attached to an email and you supply the address and type a message.
If you go through the Send To process and get an error message that no email program has been configured, you are probably using webmail.
This means you have a Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook email address and use a browser such as Google Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer to login and get your email. In this case you’ll have to shrink the file size of each photo and manually attach each one to an email.
A nifty way of shrinking digital photo sizes is to install a free program called Image Resizer for Windows (https://www.bricelam.net/ImageResizer). Select some photos, right click on one, select Resize, and the program reduces the file size of each photo for emailing and leaves the original unaffected.
First of all, open your internet browser and login to your webmail, and compose an email the same way you usually do. At some point you’ll need to attach the photos that you shrunk and at practically every webmail website you add an attachment by clicking the small paperclip icon at the bottom of the mail window. In the file window that opens you navigate to the folder on your computer where the photos are stored and select the shrunken ones to be attached. The photos will be uploaded to the webmail servers and attached to the email.
If you need some help check out the Wikihow illustrated guide for Gmail (https:// www.wikihow.com/Add-Attachments-on-Gmail), which will be applicable to almost any webmail site.
The great news is that when you figure out how to add photo attachments, you’ll be able to attach other files such as Word and PDF documents and spreadsheets.