Tips For Using Photos In Email Messages From Your Mac

There are many options you have when sending photos in an email message from your Mac. Make sure you are choosing the right size or maybe sharing them instead of sendind them. Also, when you receive a message with photos, there are different ways to view them, save them and even remove them to clear space.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you some tips for using Photos in the Mail app on your Mac. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 800 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
There are a lot of different options you have when you attach a photo to an email message on your Mac. Unfortunately, I see a lot of people making some critical mistakes when attaching photos. Also there are some other options that people could benefit from that they just don't know about. I'm going to start off with the biggest mistake I see people making. They go to compose a new message and they want to attach a photo to it. Now let me do that the simplest way by dragging and dropping from a Finder window into a Mail message. When you put it there you'll see the image appear in the body of the message. That all looks fine except if you look closely here you'll see this pop-up menu to set the image size. A lot of people don't know that that's there and they don't see what it's doing. In this case it's taking that photo, which is taken with an iPhone and is pretty high resolution, and it's reducing it to 640 x 480 which is pretty small. Only really good for viewing something on the screen. If your intention is to send somebody this photo so they can view a high quality version of it or perhaps add it to their own photos collection or even print it you don't want to use Medium. You want to go to at least Large. You could see the file size change here. This is still a pretty small file compared to the original size and large itself is actually only going to be 1280 x 960 in the case of this photo. If you really want to send them a good copy of it you're going to have to go to Actual Size. You could see the file size goes up quite a bit. But in this case you get a really high quality version of this photo. The big mistake I see is people using medium or small and expecting the person on the other end to see details. I see this just about everyday when somebody sends me a screenshot. I ask them for a screenshot, like this, and they send me a screenshot but they've got the image size set to small. At that size you can sometimes barely read the text that's on the screen. 
Now when you attach an image, either by dragging and dropping it or using the paperclip button here at the top and then selecting a file, it's going to put the image exactly where your cursor is in the message. That is unless under Edit, Attachments you have Insert Attachments at End checked. Now when I go to drop an image here, even if I put it in the message (you could see I'm putting it above the signature) it's going to add it to the end every time. The selection in here will be remembered so check or uncheck it as you want. 
Sometimes I hear about people sending email messages to Window users and the Window users not being able to see the photos that are attached. This problem used to be pretty common but now it's pretty rare. Now the important thing to remember about email is when you send an email to somebody they are reading it using their email app which is going to be different than yours. They might be using Windows. They might be on a mobile device. How the message appears to them depends on their app. Their app could render things completely differently. Show them different fonts. Show different styles. Show attachments in different ways. If you have a friend that uses Windows, particularly if they are using it in an older version of Windows, you may want to make sure that under Edit, Attachments you have checked Always Send Windows Friendly Attachments. That may help them if they are having trouble viewing the photo that you send. Now when you create a new message and then you click the Attach button here there's an Options button and there's a checkbox for sending Windows friendly attachments. Then you could use this to do it on a per message basis. 
When you receive an email message that has photos in it you'll see those photos inline in the message. But if you want to get a better view of them you can click to select a photo and then hit the spacebar for QuickLook. This will bring up the QuickLook window just like in the Finder and you can expand it or even click here to go full screen for that photo. You can also Select All, Command A, and then use spacebar for QuickLook and you could go through all of the different photos that are attached. 
Now if you want to Save a photo from the message you could drag and drop it. So I could take this photo here and drag and drop it into the Finder. I could also Control Click or right click on a Mouse, two finger click on a trackpad and use Save Attachment to Save that file with the standard File Save dialogue. Also if you go to the top to this line here and you hover your cursor over it you'll have some controls. One of those Controls is to Save All of the photos or just one of them. You could also export them all directly to the Photos app.
When I reply to this message by default the images won't be included. However if I go to Edit, Attachments I could select Include Original Attachments in Reply. Then when I reply you could see the photos are there. Note I still have this control here so I can shrink these all to Small. I can't use medium or large because these were already shrunk somewhat so I can't increase the size like that. But if I go to Actual Size it will include the originals. Now you don't need to have this Option turned on all the time. You could Reply. There's this button up here, Include Attachments From Original Message. Click that and you could see now it throws those in. Now sometimes viewing these photos could take a lot of space on the screen. You could Control Click and then choose View As Icon and do that for each one of these. Then they'll all be shrunk down to just icon size. You could control click on them again and say View In Place. You could also just select one and then press the Spacebar to use QuickLook. 
If you would rather now get the photos in your messages at all until you select to download them there's an option for that. If you go to Mail, Preferences and then go to Accounts and then select the Account under Account Information you should see Download Attachments and you could change from All or Recent or None. None means that it won't download those initially. You'd have to click on them and then it would download them from the Server. 
Now when sending photos you should always be concerned about the file size. About how much data you're sending the receiver. When you go to compose a message, say I'm going to attach a bunch of photos. I'm going to drag and drop 17  photos to this message. Notice at the top here it's going to give me message size. You always want to pay attention to that to see how much you're sending. But notice when it turns red it means you've exceeded the maximum size for a message according to your sender. It's going to depend on your email service. In this case I'm using iCloud and the maximum is 28.3 MB. So you could see this message isn't going to be able to send. I could do things like shrink the messages down and you could see now it's fine. But you should always shy away from sending lots of photos or any large attachments to somebody by email. You don't know what their situation is. Even if they have a high-speed connection at home and it's usually no problem. Maybe they're getting your email message while they're out of the house or away from work where their mobile data is precious and you've just eaten a whole bunch of it up by sending a whole bunch of photos in a message. One setting that you've got for this is under Mail, Preferences and Accounts. Then under Account Information there's Send Large Attachments with Mail Drop. That uses Apple's special service that instead of attaching the image in the Mail message it's actually going to put it in a temporary storage space on Apple's servers. Then when they view the message it's going to download them from there. So it's not going to use the email service to send those attachments if they're too large. But it doesn't help the person on the other end as they will still be downloading those large messages. 
So you may want to consider alternatives to actually sending lots of photos. One alternative I've talked about before is to simply create a Shared Album in the Photos app. You can select a bunch of photos. Then go to File, Share and you create a Shared Album. Once you have a Shared Album like this one here you can click here and send it to a public website so anybody can view it with just this link. Then Copy and Paste this link into an email message. Of if they have an Apple ID you can invite them and only they would be able to  see it. You could use other services as well like Goggle Photos or Flicker. If you just want to do it one time you could go to a site like Imgur and this allows you to just, for free, upload a photo. It creates a link to that photo and then you could share that in an email. So instead of somebody getting an email message that's a few MB in size they could get an email message that's tiny and just links to the picture at a website. Of course if you have your own web server then it's easy to upload images to that web server and send them a link directly to those images.
Now let's say you have composed a message in Mail and you've attached a picture to it. You could do more than just send them the picture. You could also mark it up. If you look on the image here at the upper right hand corner you'll see this button. Click that and choose Markup. This allows you to use lots of tools, ones you maybe familiar with from the Preview app, to markup the image. So, for instance, I could create a shape like an arrow and have the arrow point somewhere. I could add text and change the text size, font, color, all of that. I could even click here and then draw right on the image. I could even crop the image so I don't have to send them the entire thing. Then you'll send them this image. Your original image that you have is untouched. It's only this copy that you're sending them that actually has all these changes that are applied directly to the photo. 
Now also using your iPhone or iPad you could take a photo and then have it directly attached to the message. So I could be composing a new message right here. If I click this button here and use the options here, Take Photo, Scan Documents, or Add sketch, and these will all then call out to my iPhone or iPad if I had one connected to the same Apple ID and eventually show me the camera interface or the scanning interface or a drawing interface on my phone and I could do anyone of these. Then that would get attached to my Mail message on my Mac. You also don't have to start the email messages here, like this, and then attach photos to it. You could do it different ways. For instance in the Photos app you could select a photo and then use the Share button here and then Mail. It will open up a new email message with that photo already attached. You could select multiple photos and do the same thing and all those photos would be attached to the message. Another thing you could do is you could drag and drop a photo to the Mail app here in the Dock and it will do the same thing but with a file instead of from the Photos app.
Now here's one last tip. Say you get an email from someone and it has a bunch of different photos and you Save those photos out. You save them to the Finder. You save them to your Photos app or maybe you just look at them and now you don't need to see them ever again. Well, you don't have to have those photos saved forever in your email archive. You can remove them from the message while keeping the text of the message. So maybe they included some important information in the text that you want to keep but you just don't need those large photo files attached to it. When viewing the message you can go to Message and then go to Remove Attachments. That will remove those attachments from the message. You'll still have the original message. They'll still be saved in your archive without taking up much less space.

Comments: 6 Responses to “Tips For Using Photos In Email Messages From Your Mac”

Mike Ritchie

4 years ago

Great information using photos in email messages. What tips would apply (if any) using photos is imessages.

Gary Rosenzweig

Mike: The main tip for using photos in messages is to only use them to "show" the other person something. Never send a photo to them for storing/archiving/using in some other way. They won't be getting a high resolution version.

Irma Williams

Gary, I received a MacBook Air for Christmas. It has been wonderful to have MacMost! Perhaps because I am 85, I cannot absorb all you are saying because of your rapid speech. Therefore, the accompanying text is a great feature!
Thank you so much for your help!

K. Sinclair

Terrific lesson--

carl myers

how can i take a picture of my signature and move it where ever i want ?

carl: Inside an email message? Typically you sign PDFs, not editable messages like emails. I suppose you could do it just like any photo.

Comments Closed.

Tips For Using Photos In Email Messages From Your Mac

Comments: 6 Responses to “Tips For Using Photos In Email Messages From Your Mac”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information