Emailing a Photo / Resizing a Photo

Digital cameras nowdays provide you with a quality of photo suitable for enlarging and printing. This quality however is not suitable for email or websites as they are quite large. When emailing these photos it can take a lot of time and your recipients are left with a file clogging up their inbox.

There are many ways to resize a photo before emailing it. If you try a couple, you can find one that works for you. In a previous article I showed you how to Resize a photo with Paint. Paint is a simple photo software that comes free with Windows. If you have Photoshop, or Paintshop Pro, or Gimp, or any photo software, these provide you with a lot of options for manipulating your photos, and it is worth your time exploring these.

Today I wanted to show you some of the easiest ways to do it.

Resizing with Outlook

If you have an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird, Windows provides resizing functionality.

1. Find the photo on your computer you want to email.
2. Right click on the photo -> send to -> mail recipient.
3. A window will pop up asking you what Picture Size you would like. To make it easy to email I normally select 800 x 600.
4. If you then click attach, your email client will open with the photo attached at a good size, and you can compose your email.
5. If you wanted to use this resized photo elsewhere, to upload to your website for instance, you can right click on the name of the file and open it and it will prompt you where to save it. You can then save it to someplace on your computer to use later.

Resizing with Windows Photo Gallery

You can do the same thing we have just done if you are browsing your photos with Windows Photo Gallery.

1. Double click on one of your photos, or right click and open with Windows Photo Gallery.
2. You can now browse through all your photos till you get to the one you want to email/resize.
3. On the top of the window you will see buttons, File Fix Info etc, click Email.
4. A window will pop up asking you what Picture Size you would like. To make it easy to email I normally select 800 x 600.
5. If you then click attach, your email client will open with the photo attached at a good size, and you can compose your email.
6. If you wanted to use this resized photo elsewhere, to upload to your website for instance, you can right click on the name of the file and open it and it will prompt you where to save it. You can then save it to someplace on your computer to uuse later.

Resizing with a Mac

Things are even easier on a Mac. You attach your photo to a new email, an easy way to do this is to drag and drop it. Once you have done this an email message will pop up to allow you to select an Image Size. Select Small or Medium and your photo will be immediately scaled down within the email message window so you can see the exact size before sending.

So those are some simple methods to resize your photos for email or your website. However there are many others, depending on the software you have, keep on investigating till you find a method that suits you.