How to e-mail large photos

Tired of sending your enormous 8 megapixel photos in an e-mail and having it bounce back or jam up in your outbox? Well there's a super simple fix for it built right into windows XP!

Step1

First, I have to mention that this doesn't work for webmail like gmail or yahoo. You have to be using Outlook, Eudora, Incredemail, or some other e-mail program that actually resides on your computer. To start, select/highlight all the photos you want to send in whatever folder they're in. You can selectively pick them out by holding the control key and clicking on them. Every one you click on will be added to the selection. You can also hold the shift key to select a bunch of pictures in a row. Either way, try to keep it under about 10 photos so size isn't a problem for you or the person you're sending them to.

Step2

Now that they're all selected, right click on any one of them and click on the "Send to" option. Wait a couple seconds as this menu sometimes takes a while to load in XP.

Step3

When it finally does load, click on "mail recipient" and it will bring up a box asking if you want to make all the pictures smaller or keep the original sizes. This is where you want to choose “make all pictures smaller.”

Step4

When you press okay, it will compress all your photos down instantly, save a temporary copy of them to be e-mailed, and automatically attach them to a brand new e-mail in your default e-mail program. Unfortunately it adds a bunch of text in the e-mail body about what's attached but you can just delete all that.

Step5

The photos are usually compressed down to under 150KB which is great because they can be upwards of 3000KB when they come off your camera and that's too big for some e-mail systems. Now all you need to do is fill in the To: line and add your own message in the body and then hit send. It's also a good idea to replace the subject line with something more meaningful than "Emailing:" followed by a list of the files you're e-mailing.