Email a photo
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. My picture here of a friend’s cat [Edit: picture removed temporarily] is a perfectly OK size at 320 * 214 and is only 8Kb. Click the picture for a version which is 640 * 427 and 20kb in size. The photo was prepared using Adobe ImageReady CS.
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)
See an animated screenshot of the choices.
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 FBAMac Tip #52/24-Apr-2002: Bits, Bytes, Megabytes and Gigabytes 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. See my tutorial, Prepare a Photo for Screen, for more details.
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is jointly authored by Miraz Jordan and Maria Langer.
Discussion
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
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.
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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