Filed under: Tips and tricks
Resize photos within Mail
Here's a nifty tip from Apple that I was completely unaware of. Whenever I email a photo, I do so via iPhoto, which takes care of resizing for me. Apparently you can resize photos that you drop into Mail messages from the Finder just as easily. Once you've got the photo into the body of your message, a drop down menu will appear in the window's lower right hand corner. Click it to reveal several options: Small, Medium, Large and Full Size. Make your selection and your image is resized for you.
Perhaps you've been doing this for ages now, but as someone who uses iPhoto for this procedure, it was news to me.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
John said 3:12PM on 1-31-2007
that is freaking amazing. It's like finding your sunglasses when they've been on your head the whole time.
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Dave5 said 3:23PM on 1-31-2007
This is a great little tool.
It has an unfortunate draw back. The setting is applied to all attachments in the email. I was using this the other day and I wanted to attached a combo of images and PDFs... it also scaled the PDFs (replacing them with downsized images of the PDF files).
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loki capret said 3:55PM on 1-31-2007
I use this when posting to websites or forums also. Just drag from iPhoto to Mail, resize, and drag into browser to post. Then just close the Mail message without saving and you're all done!
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stooke said 4:19PM on 1-31-2007
I've used this for a while, my complaint is it seems to use a really, really high quality level, so the actual size in bytes is still larger than you'ld expect.
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CRASHLOCK said 4:29PM on 1-31-2007
I've been using this for ages. :)
But..
If you missed that you might have missed this:
Whenever your typing in your web browser like I am here you might make some spelling mistakes. Well Apple included a spell checker built into the OS. Just right/ctrl click on a text box in your browser, right there you will see 'Spelling' scroll down to it and another sub menu will give you 3 options, 'Spelling', 'Check Spelling' or 'Check Spelling as You Type'. I choose Check Spelling as You Type, and with that 1 click it will stay on even if you quit. It underlines misspelled words in red as you type like a word processor. Then when you go to correct it double click the word to highlight it in blue then again right/ctrl click to bring up the options and your gorgeous Mac OS will right there give you some guessed corrections to choose from. If there's one there that you meant to use just click it and then boom the original word is replaced by the new correctly spelt version.
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Jon H said 6:17PM on 1-31-2007
Are you sure that actually shrinks the file, and doesn't just adjust the display size?
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Eric Carroll said 7:12PM on 1-31-2007
It does actually resize the photos, you can see the Message size in KB at the bottom of the email too and it will update if you change the sizes...
And to clarify, this is STILL there if you use iPhoto to send images over to MAIL to email to someone, so if you say large when exporting from iPhoto, and you decide it needs to be smaller, you can still chose to make it smaller (although it won't make it BIGGER than the size you sent from iPhoto)...
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GmanMac said 7:41PM on 1-31-2007
@6
if you look in the left hand corner it shows the file size reduction.
What a great tip.
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russell said 8:24PM on 1-31-2007
Photos resized in Mail are of noticably lower quality than if you choose the same size when you push the Mail button in iPhoto. I don't know why this is.
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jordan said 9:12PM on 1-31-2007
you are sooooo
S.T.U.P.I.D.
This is why sites like digg are so much better than sites like this. If this was on digg, this woul have 10 diggs... then fall off into the wasteland of stupid stories...
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Dave Gannon said 11:00PM on 1-31-2007
hey thanks for the info on shrinking pics in Mail. I did not know that and like you, use iPhoto most of the time. good information here.
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DMK said 12:40AM on 2-01-2007
Thank you! Never noticed this feature.
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Chris said 4:35AM on 2-01-2007
@russell : I was just about to comment on the low-quality (in the visible sense, not as a JPEG compression setting) too. I must admit I'd assumed it was using a system-wide re-sizing function and that iPhoto would be no better, but I guess I'd better look into that now.
To Apple Inc. : If you're sending a reduced size version of an image to someone for whatever bandwidth/storage reasons, you really don't want the image to be compromised further by some crummy resize function, so how about a fix?
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mark said 8:44AM on 2-01-2007
I think Apple should add an option to control the JPEG quality (as in %). Now I have pictures which are medium sized and still the same size (in bytes) as larger pictures (as in pixels).
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Celine said 9:55AM on 2-01-2007
Yep, is new for me too ^_^ If only I'd know that before!
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dalasv said 1:29AM on 2-02-2007
Thanks for your valuable input, jordan!
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Pamela Cohen said 12:26AM on 4-21-2007
HEY guys...I stil get my emails rejected on Craig's List for med. or small pics dragged into the email body of mail. So, I still need to know what a custom-sized cropped pic should measure, or in other words, how to resize an i-photo file and store it in a folder on my desktop, say, to use for email additions. Or, what program works on MAC to resize these photos.Pamela
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