Email a photo

iPhoto makes it easy to email a photo in a couple of clicks.

Email a photo
Mac Tip #146/21-April-2004

If you’re like most people with a digital camera then you probably want to email some of your photos to friends and family. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of attachments which take an hour to download, then you’ll also know that there is quite an art to sending photos while at the same time keeping friends. iPhoto makes this easy and allow you to do it all in a couple of clicks. The screenshots clarify the explanation below.

First open iPhoto and make sure you’re in the Organize section. Now select a photo and click the Email button.

Here comes the crucial part where you need to make some choices from the pop-up menu. A small photo will transmit very quickly while a large photo will transmit slowly (and your friends will get very annoyed). On the other hand, a small photo’s hard to see while a large photo can be splendid.

iPhoto will let you choose from several sizes. For a photo I selected I was offered:

240 * 320 (63 Kb)
640 * 480 (122 Kb)
1280 * 960 (414 Kb)
Full size (full quality) (1.5 Mb)

Note the file size displayed in kilobytes (Kb) or megabytes (Mb). Aim for something less than about 100Kb for any one email message. Remember there are 1024 kilobytes in one megabyte. See Bits, Bytes, Megabytes and Gigabytes, Mac Tip #52/24-Apr-2002, for help on these file sizes.

Once you’ve selected a size click the Compose button and you’ll be taken to your email software to finish putting your email message together.

While iPhoto does a good rough and ready job there are half a dozen steps you could take to reduce the size of a photo and to prepare it properly for email. A well-prepared photo will look great and take only a few seconds to transmit.

Read more Tips tagged with: email • iPhoto • Mail • photo

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* 3 comments… read them below and tell us what you think.

james Ryan 29 July 2008 at 07:30:26: Can i send photos from i photo using an email other than mac? When I try to select my email there is no place in the preferences to do this. My photos automatically go to mac.

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Miraz Jordan 30 July 2008 at 20:17:49: iPhoto should use the email software you’ve selected as your default software. Open Mail and go to Preferences – General. There’s a pop-up where you can choose your default email reader.

Try that.

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joanne gotelli 29 September 2010 at 09:22:39: I am trying to “attach” photos from I-photo into e-mails. They go OK but they are small (even when I use “actual size” or “large” and, when people receive them, they can’t enlarge them. They are very small. I tried going to Comcast or my photos and picking them out (there’s a bunch of pictures, but you’d have to click on all of them to find the one you want) and that doesn’t work. I moved the photo I want to my desktop and that doesn’t do it either. There has to be a way to send photos to people that they can make bigger isn’t there? Thank you so much.

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