E-mailing Digital Photos

This material is excerpted from the forthcoming book Displaying & Sharing your Digital Photographs. If you would like to be notified when the book is published click the link below to send me an e-mail: E-mail me when the Displaying & Sharing book is published To see the book's tentative table of contents, click the link below: Show me the table of contents for the Displaying and Sharing book

One of the most popular ways to share digital images is by e-mail. You just write a message, attach or insert the image file, and send it to one or more recipients. E-mail has become so universal that it's a great way to distribute your photographs. Even cell phones and personal digital assistants have integrated the ability into their products. Even a few cameras have tried building in e-mail capability so you could send images right from the camera.

There are two basic ways to include a photo in a message, as an attachment or an insert.

Attaching Photos

In the early days, e-mail was as basic as you could get. A message could just contain letters, numbers, and a few symbols such as dollar signs and ampersands. Because it was so basic, the only way to send photos, or other files, was to attach them to the message—much like you’d paperclip a photo to a letter you were sending. When the attachment arrived at the recipient’s end, it had to be opened to be viewed.

Almost all e-mail program's have an Attach command somewhere on their menus. When you use this command, you have to enter the name of the image file you want to attach and most programs let you browse to find it on your system. After you've attached the photo, you just click the Send command and the message with the attached photo is on its way.

When an e-mail with an attachment arrives at the recipient's end, they can open the photo for viewing and even save it. Once saved, it can be used just like any other photo on the system.

The one big problem with attachments is that you can also attach EXE files, and that’s how viruses are spread. Many people have stopped opening them and many firewalls or filters block them.

Inserting Photos

Instead of attaching photos, you can insert them right into the body of the message. When the recipient opens the e-mail, the photos are displayed right along with the text. To create this enhanced form of e-mail, the e-mail program uses HTML, the same language used to layout and format Web pages. You can create these more elaborate e-mails yourself using your e-mail program’s background, stationary, and font commands, but programs have been developed that make it even easier. They let you create and send the equivalent of a photo album page or colorful postcard. The background, called stationary, is usually a GIF or JPEG image file added by selecting one the of templates offered by the program. Of course, things being what they are, there is no guarantee that the recipient will see the message the same way you formatted it. AOL users in particular have difficulties with graphics in e-mail.

Since enhanced e-mail is such a popular way to send photos this ability is being increasingly integrated into programs you use to edit and organize your images, or create postcards, albums, and sideshows. For example, Photoshop Album lets you create cards, albums, and slide shows and then print them, burn them to a CD/DVD, or e-mail them as fully formatted PDF files. If you choose to e-mail them the program reduces the size and quality of the images to reduce the size of the file and the time it takes to download to the recipient’s computer.

E-Mail Etiquette

There is a certain etiquette to be observed when e-mailing photos, especially regarding file sizes and formats.

Many people are on slow dial up systems such as AOL. Be sure you only send small image files so you don't bog down the recipient's system when it receives them. Many image files are 1 megabyte or more and take forever to download to a dial up system such as AOL. These images are also too large to be seen on the screen so the user has to scroll them up and down and side to side. It's like looking at an image through a paper tube. Not only is it impolite to send too large an image (or too many images), they may also be blocked by an e-mail gateway somewhere along the route or by the settings on the recipient’s computer. They may also fill the recipient’s allotted space on their e-mail account, blocking other e-mail. To make an image smaller, use a photo editing program to reduce the size to 640 x 480 or so, or increase compression. A smaller image will still look great on the screen. If you are using Windows XP or Apple’s OSX, you can resize an image at the time you’re sending it or Windows users can download a free power toy called Image Resizer.

Be sure to send images in a format, such as JPEG, that most e-mail programs support. If you send Photoshop (PSD), RAW, or TIFF files, the recipient won’t be able to see them unless they have a program that supports those formats.

To transfer large image files that are being blocked by e-mail gateways or mail box limitations, try a peer-to-peer exchange.