Avoid This Mistake When Emailing Images

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you a big mistake a lot of people make when sending images using the Mail App. 

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Now often when people send images in an email message using the Mail App they make the mistake of making the image too small so the person getting on the other end doesn't get a full resolution or even decent resolution image but a really small one. This is an even bigger problem when you're sending a screenshot which happens to me all the time. People sending me screenshots that are too small to tell what is going on.

So for instance here I am in the Mail App and I'm going to attach an image to this email message I'm composing. I'm going to go to the Photos App here and I'm going to take an image from the Photos App and drag it into the email message. An easy way to attach an image. Now I can send this image. But if I look closely I'll notice that image size appears here on the right. You can see how it is set to small. There's also medium, large, and actual size. It will show you the pixel sizes next to each one. Small is only 320 by 240. Which is considerably smaller than a typical image which could be somewhere around 4000 by 3000 pixels. So Mail is actually taking the original image and shrinking it down. This makes it a lot easier to send over email especially if the person at the other end doesn't have great band width or maybe they are even on the go using their mobile device. But if the idea is to clearly see details in the photo, setting small is not a good idea. So you're going to want to customize this. Do medium, do large, and it tells you the image size here. So you can see what you're sacrificing when you go from small, an 81K file, to medium, a 225 K file, and then to large, 817, or the actual size of the photo. But take a look at the actual difference in the photo to what you're seeing when you look at the photo on your Mac, an actual size, to what they are seeing when they look at the small, extremely shrunk image.

I can actually drag this image out of my message and put it here on the Desktop. If I double click on it I can open it up in Preview and we can zoom in here and see, because there are so few pixels, you can see the individual pixels really easily. Whereas if I go back to Photos and I look at the same photo and I zoom in on the same area you can see how detailed it actually is.

Now here's the thing. You may think, okay great, lesson learned. I'll make sure I don't send small images anymore. Well, it remembers your last setting. So if you did decide to send an image small, the next time you send an image it will also be small. Or at least start off that way. So, for instance, instead of going to the Photos App I'll just drag and drop a file now into the Mail App. You can see it remembered last time I set it to small. If I were to change it and say let's make that large. So still a decent file size but we get some pretty good resolution. But it may not be as bad as the actual size. If I were to drag an image in again you can see it remembers, the last time you sent an email it was large so it is going to use large again. So it is easy to use small once and suddenly be sending all your images as very small ones because you're not paying attention to image size here in Mail.

Now this is particularly bad when you send a screenshot. So I'm going to do Shift, Command, 5 and I'm going to capture the entire screen and click here to capture this screen. Here I've got this image right here. If I were to drag and drop the screenshot into Mail, and the last time I used this I had a small image size set, which may have been fine for sending a quick little photo or something, then you could see it also makes this very small. Let me drag this back out and save it out so now I've got the original one and I've got this small one, the one I was going to send in the email message. If I double click on it in Preview and try to look at it, you could see how difficult it is to tell what's going on. You can see how pixelated it is and if there is specific controls and things that you want the other person to see it's going to be very hard for them to see those. But you can fix this very easily by going to Image Size and setting it to Actual Size for screenshots. Which is probably what you want so the person you're sending it to can see every pixel clearly.

Now another way this could happen, even if you're not using the Mail App, uploading something to the internet or sharing something with AirDrop is in Photos if you go to export and then you select Export 1 Photo, you can see here you also have a size. You can actually set that to Small, Medium, Large, and Full Size just like before. So if I set this to Small and then Export and then Export this image to the Desktop the image I get here is actually really small. So if I'm now going to share this file I'm actually going to be sharing its small size no matter what. As a matter of fact if I were to drop this into the Mail App here you can see I don't even get options here. Why? Because the size of this is small size. You can't get resolution where there isn't any so there's no medium option, there's no large option, and there's no actual size option. The only option is small because that is the actual resolution of this file that I exported. So you don't see this here because the image resolution is already too small. The same thing is true for this image. This image here is also 300 by 240 already a small size. So if I were to drag this image in I'm not going to get any options here. Sometimes you get options just to do small or medium because the actual image is smaller than what large would be.

But the worst part is the next time you go to Export an image from Photos, if you go to File and then Export and then use the standard Export option it remembers the size. So, because you want it to export an image as small or maybe medium one time, you may not think about it the next time and get small or medium that time too and every time afterwards because you're not paying attention to the size setting here and changing it back to large or full size for your next export.

So pay attention to that or you'll have the same problem everywhere, not just in Mail. So the bottomline is pay attention to the image size setting in the Mail App before you send an email message with an image attachment. If you don't see an option there it probably means you're using too small of an image to begin with. Maybe go back to the original source image and bring that into Mail. Let Mail shrink it down to whatever size that you want, but maybe not too small.

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.