How To Choose the Right Photo Options For Email Messages

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to choose the right options when sending a photo in an email. 

So sending a photo in an email is pretty simple, right? You just attach the photo to the email and Send. But there are actually a lot of different ways to attach a photo to an email. Sometimes it matters which one you use. In addition there is one very important setting you need to pay attention to and a few others you should know about as well. So here are the five major ways to attach a photo to an email message. 

Here in the Mail App I'm going to create a new message. The most obvious way to do it is to look for the little paperclip button here, the Attachment Button. You can attach a file, which is useful if the photo was actually a file. But if the photo is in your Photos Library, which is where it probably is, then you're going to choose Photos. This brings up a little interface here that shows you your Photos Library and you can look through Collections, like Albums, do searches in your library and all of that. If it is a recent photo it is probably right here at the top though. So we're going to select this one and then click Add. It will add the photo to the email message. But another way to do it is to start in Photos and then select the photo you want. Then you can Share it using either the Share Button here or Control Click, right click, two-finger click on the photo and choose Share here. Either way you get a Share Dialogue and you choose Mail. When you do that it will switch to the Mail App and create a new Mail message. Note that if you had an existing message that you were composing and you've already written something in it this probably isn't a good option for you because you've now got the photo attached to a new email message but not the one you were working in. But if you haven't yet started composing a message this is a great way to start a new message and attach the photo to it in one step. 

Now of course you're on a Mac so you can also use Drag & Drop for this. You can see the photo in the Photos App in one window and then the message you're composing in another window. You can simply drag from one to the other and it will place the photo in there. This has the advantage of placing the photo exactly where you want in the message. So if you're composing a really long message you can put it at the end or the beginning or somewhere in the middle. Now as a side note you can also Drag & Drop to the Mail icon in the Dock. But this is the same as using the Share button and starting a new message from the Photos App. So if I do that here you can see it creates a new message here and it doesn't use my existing one. But it's actually easier than using the Share button. So you may want to do that if that was your intention anyway. 

Now there are those people who like to use Drag & Drop a lot and there are those people that like to use Copy & Paste a lot. You can certainly do that in this situation too. You can select the photo and then use Edit, Copy or simply Command C and then go to the message and then Command V to Paste. This is like dragging and dropping in that you can put the photo where you want in the message. 

Then there is one more method that is going to become very useful as we look at the more advanced options. That is to export the photo first as a file. Go to File, Export, Export Photo. You can use Shift Command E if you like and then export it somewhere. Right away you'll see a bit of an advantage because you get to choose a lot of different options when you're exporting. You can choose the Format. If it is JPEG you can choose the quality. So this gives you maximum control. Then export. In this case we'll export as a file to the Desktop. Now that it is a file on the Desktop we can bring it into the Mail App using the same attachment button but this time Attach File. Or we can Drag & Drop or even Copy & Paste to put the file in the message. 

Now how can you get the photo in the email message? There's a very important step that a lot of people skip. A lot of people actually don't know about it. This is the most important thing I'm going to teach in this tutorial. Let's go and attach a photo using the very first method there. I've added it in. The setting isn't down here with the photo. You won't get it if you Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on it. You won't even get it using the little dropdown menu here which brings you to Markup Tools and other options. The setting is actually up here. It's above even the text styling controls. It's really easy to miss. You see when you bring a photo into an email message it is most likely going to be recompressed and resized to be sent over email. This done to shrink the file size down so you're not sending huge email messages. It is also done to make the image compatible with older computer systems that don't use the HEIC photo format which has been the default for taking photos on the iPhone since 2017 and today all cameras support it. It's a better image format. It produces higher quality at smaller file sizes. But if you're sending to somebody who has an older windows machine or even a very old Mac they won't be able to view HEIC files. So for compatibility purposes the image is converted to JPEGs and they may or may not be resized. Now that's what this easy to miss control is right here. This Menu. the actual size will give you the width and height of the original photo. That's the number of pixels wide and number of pixels tall the photo is. Large can shrink that considerably. You can see it shows you. 1280 by 960 which is much smaller than is the standard size of an iPhone photo today. Medium will take you to smaller, 640 by 480 which is one quarter of the number of pixels in the large size. Small will go to one quarter of that, 320 by 240. In fact you can see the file size savings with each one of these by looking here. You'll see here Message Size. In this case the message is just the photo. So almost all of this 3.8 MB is the photo itself. So actual size is 3.8 MB. If I go to large that dives down to 674K. If I go medium it is a tiny 208K. Small is a mini 87K for the photo. Notice the photo changes in the message so you can see exactly what the person is going to get. This is literally the photo they are going to get. This small. If they try to zoom in on it it will look like a really pixelated photo. As you go larger it is going to increase the size and when it reaches a limit, where it can't be shown any larger inside your window then you really won't be able to tell. So you can't really see the difference between Large and actual size right here. But it is going to be a huge difference for the person when they actually look at the image full screen on their computer or tries to zoom in on part of it. So if you want somebody to actually see and enjoy the photo don't ever go below Medium. But you probably want to send them something large if you expect them to maybe want to keep the photo. But actual size is the best if the photo is really important. Like if you are sending them a photo you took of them and the idea is they can keep it in their Photos Library. They are not going to want the medium or large size one. They are going to want the actual size version of that so they have something close to the original taken with the camera. 

The difference is also very striking when you attach a screenshot image. So I've got a screenshot here. I'm going to Drag & Drop that in here. In actual size you can see how clear it is. In this case its actual size and large are not any different. That's why the large option isn't even offered. But Medium will make it much smaller. Now this is a mistake that a lot of people make. You make it Small and you won't even be able to read the text in the screenshot. But so often people will send a small or medium size screenshot not realizing that this isn't a little thumbnail version of the actual image. This is the actual image itself. The person at the other end probably won't be able to get much from it if this is all they receive. So make sure you choose your size carefully.

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So from what I said you can imagine that if you attach a photo, like this, and add it here and make sure you set the image to Actual Size they are going to get something pretty close, if not the original photo. After all it says 'actual'. Right? You would think that means that it is basically the original photo. That's not true because this is going to be set as JPEG, something that is compatible with any computer today. However, the original photo is more than JPEG. Notice here it says image size 3.8 MB. We can actually take this and drag it out to the Finder to kind of export what we had in the message. We can select it and get info on it and see the size right here. We can see the dimensions and we can see, in fact, that it is a JPEG image. However, the original is not a JPEG that's that size. If we go back to Photos here, we select this and then we get Info we can see it is, in fact, a HEIC file. So High Efficiency Image format. We can see the size is right. We can see the dimensions are right. The actual file size is smaller. HEIC is a better quality compression algorithm. So HEIC compresses things better. The 2.2MB HEIC is actually slightly higher quality than the JPEG you'll be sending. But all five of the methods I showed for attaching the photo will convert this HEIC photo to a JPEG. 

How do you keep the HEIC photo?  Well, there are two ways. One is to export the image first. We're going to do it here using standard export options. We're not going to export the original because we're going to assume maybe you've gone in and made some brightness adjustments, some color adjustments, things like that. So we want to change the Kind to HEIC since you know that's what you're using. We want to make sure you set the size full size. Now we're going to export this and we're going to export it to the Desktop. Now instead of a JPEG, because we chose HEIC, we get the HEIC file here. You can look at it and see that it is the nice small file size, which is a bonus, and it is going to be the best quality as well. Bring this in. Just Drag & Drop it into the message. You're still going to get the same thing. Notice the file size went up to 3.7MB you're still going to send the JPEG. But there is a new option. If you look under Image Size you'll see you've got this new option to send the original image. This will only happen if you're attaching a HEIC File, not coming from the Photos App. When you do so you can see the size drops down. Mail isn't going to change the image. It is going to attach it as is. That's what the other person will get. 

But there is a second way to do this. If you go here to the Attachment Menu and attach a photo. Select this photo and before you Click Add click the three dots button here. Then go to Options. Now you get some Options. One is Format. It sets up Automatic. Instead change that to Current. When you change it to current you'll get a JPEG file. You can see how it is bigger there. But, you get the ability to change the image size to Original Image. So you have to do two things. You have to change the format and select original image. Now it will send HEIC. But once you've made that change note that if you go back and you do it again you'll see under Options it remembers and sticks with Current. 

Now I've spent most of the time talking about getting the original image and getting the best quality. But there is another setting you may want to pay attention to. Notice here when you were in Options you had the ability to turn Off location and turn Off captions. So it won't include those things when you send the image. You may want to keep the location of the photo private and not share it over email. If you have included some text in the captions that you also don't want to share you may want to have those turned Off as well. In Photos you actually have a setting under General for Include Location Information when Sharing. Then when you export a photo you also have the location information and the caption there that you can turn Off before you export it as a file.  So that is useful if you just want to make sure it is not there before you even attach it or before you're sharing in a different way and not email. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.