8 Better Alternatives To Sending Large Email Attachments

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are eight alternatives to sending large email attachments.

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So one internet practice I don't like is sending files by email attachment. I always think twice before sending any file as an email attachment and I almost never send large attachments. Even if you have the bandwidth to upload a file and a good internet provider that will accept large attachments the person you're sending it to may not have good bandwidth and their email provider may not allow a large attachment. Some people even have bandwidth limits. You have to consider that today sometimes people are reading their email on their phones while on the go. Sending a large attachment that's going to clog up their email on their phone is not a good idea. Fortunately there are other ways to send files to other people. In all of these you can still send them an email with a link to this file. It's just not going to be included as a big attachment with the email.

One of the most common things you may want to share are images. If an image is a photograph and it's already in your Photos app it's easy to share into an iCloud Gallery. You can do that right from the Photos app and then include a link in an email. So let's select three photos from here. You could just select one or it could be a whole bunch of them.Then I'm going to click on the Share button here and then go to Shared Albums. I can create a new shared album here and give it a name. I can invite people to see it so other Apple ID's. I can just create this. You'll see it appear on the left under Shared Albums. If I select it I can see what's in there. I could also click this button here at the top and I could change things about it. So, for instance, I can select whether other people can post to this album, whether it's Public which may be exactly what you want. Notice here I get this URL. I can Copy and Paste this URL into an email and give whoever I want access to these three photos.

Now an alternative is to use one of the many free websites that allow you to upload images and share them. Probably the biggest one out there is called Imgur.com and you can go there. You can have an account there so you can maintain your little collection of images. But you don't have to. You can just click New Post here on the page and then you can select an image and drop it there. It will upload and give you a link for you to share it. So someone else getting this link here would see this. A private window here and you can see you go to it and there is the image right there that they can see and they can also download it.

There are dozens of other sites like Imgur. Here are two examples. This on is Ultraimg and Postimage.org. You can search and find tons of other sites that you can just throw images into without even signing up or sign up to get more features. 

Of course video is also a common file type that you may want to share. Those files can be huge. So very difficult to send an email attachment and probably pretty unwelcome  as an attachment as well. You can upload to a free video service. Of course the biggest name out there is YouTube. People don't realize that you can upload to YouTube and not publish it to the world. There's a private option and an unlisted option. So, for instance, here I am in a sample YouTube account. I could click on Add and upload a video here. Take this video and drag and drop it to Upload. You can see here I can set all of the information and including visibility. In visibility I can set it to be Unlisted. So basically it's publicly available to anybody but they have to know the exact URL to go to. So it's unlikely anybody else is going to stumble upon it. In addition I could also set it to Private. In that case I would have to know other people's YouTube ID which is their Goggle or gmail email address to be able to send them access to get to see this video. This is a great way to send a video that's really easy for anybody because you can watch YouTube on all sorts of different platforms. It's not good for downloading though. If the other person needs to download video then you really need to be able to send them the file. There are other video services out there as well. Some you have to pay for although sometimes there are free tiers. Vimeo is probably the biggest name outside of YouTube and has all sorts of other advanced features. 

So when you want to send somebody a file whether it's a photo, a video, or any other kind of file you can do it using a variety of different services. Now you're probably  already using iCloud Drive if you're on a Mac. Even if you're not using it for Desktop and Documents you have, at least, the free iCloud Drive space that Apple provides. You can share files using iCloud Drive. So, for instance, I have this video here. I can Control click on the file and select Share. One of my options is to Add People. This will Share using iCloud Drive. It works because my Desktop here is an iCloud Drive folder. Otherwise if it's not I have to make sure I put it in iCloud Drive before I try to Share it. Then I basically get Share options here. I can simply Copy a Link and send it to anybody anyway I want or I can have an email sent to them. I could also have Share options like who can access it. Only people with the Apple ID's that I provide or Anyone with a link and Whether or not people can make changes to the file. So that would pertain, to say, if you were uploading a document like Pages, Numbers, or Keynote, Word, Photoshop or something like that. If you change it to View Only then all they can do is see it and download it. They can't change the file that's on your iCloud Drive. If I go back into Share and Show People now then I could see that there. I could look at the Share options and I could Copy Link. This is what it looks like to them when they try to access it on the web. You could see they can add it to their iCloud Drive or simply hit Download a Copy. 

Now another option is simply to use any other Cloud service. So, for instance, I'll demonstrate here using Dropbox. I've got Dropbox installed here. Just a free account. I have a Dropbox folder. I can move this file into Dropbox. I can Control click on it and select Share and then I could share it with somebody else very similar to how iCloud Drive is doing it. A similar functionality exists in all of the major Cloud services. So whether you use Goggle, Microsoft or something else there's a way to share a file as long as you have it in that Cloud service. Then here in Dropbox I can Create Link and then simply copy the link and now that is available and I can go and paste that into an email. That would then look something like this in the browser to another person. Dropbox is even smart enough to recognize, in this case, that it's a video and allow you to play the video. But I can also just hit the Download button for this video or any file that's sent.

Now there are also a number of free websites out there that allow you to share large files with other people. They work in a very similar way to those photo sites we were looking at before but they work with any kind of file. So the one I'm going to feature here is send.firefox.com from the same people that bring you the Firefox browser. They allow you to basically upload anything that you want here. Just drag and drop. Hit Upload and you have all sorts of cool different options. You've got a link here. This is what it would look like to somebody else. They could see the file there and hit download. Really easy. Just Copy and Paste that link into your email to send.

There are also dozens of other services that do basically the same thing. Here are three. This one is called WeTransfer.com. Another is called FromSmash.com. Both of these allow you to share things without even signing up. A third one is pretty popular is called Hightail.com. You have to sign up but it's a free account. 

This next method is kind of like sending it in email but not. It's using Apple's Mail Drop feature. So Mail Drop is kind of invisible to the receiver. They're still getting an attachment or what looks like an attachment. It's actually downloading from Apple's servers. It basically tries to send an attachment but instead of actually sending it as part of the message it's actually storing it on one of Apple's servers and then sending an email with a link to the attachment. So it has some great benefit like if your email provider doesn't allow attachments over a certain size then Mail Drop will allow you to send large attachments. It's also kind of automatic which is good and bad. So in the Mail app on Mac if you go to Preferences and then Accounts  under Account Information for each account you'll see a checkbox here for whether or not Mail Drop is enabled for that account. So make sure it's Enabled for each account that you want to use it for. Then it kind of works invisibly. So I'm going to compose a new message here and I'm going to attach a large attachment, something over 20 MB. Now when I go to hit Send it's a little confusing as to whether it's using Mail Drop or not. I've never liked this feature because of that confusion.

Now it's done right if you actually go to iCloud.com and send an email. So I compose a message here and I want to include an attachment, that large attachment here. It's actually going to come up with a box asking me if I want to use Mail Drop. I think that's how it should work in the Mail app.

Now I have included an eighth option here especially for professionals and businesses. That is to setup your own private server. Often when we think of internet hosting we think of websites. But you can also use internet hosting for sharing files. So you can take a host like say Liquidweb which is the host I use or some other popular ones like BlueHost or DreamHost and signup for an account with them. You'll of course have to pay something every month but usually in control panels there are ways to setup kind of a file sharing server or just load files onto different webpages to be able to share them throughout your organization. This is great for companies that really need to control everything about their files and don't want to rely on some other service and worry about things like security and privacy. So it's not an option for most people but for some it is the only option.