Tech Team Newsletter - Volume 5 Issue 5

Tech Team: In the Trenches

July 2007 Volume 5 Issue 5

In this Issue:

Making Photos E-Mail Friendly

Q. When I started e-mailing pictures five years ago, I was taught that they could not be larger than one megabyte, so I always reduce the size of my pictures in Photoshop. Lately, however, I have been successfully receiving pictures that are more than one megabyte over my D.S.L. connection. Did the rules change?

A. Back in the days of dial-up connections, many Internet service providers had smaller limits on the size of the file attachments on e-mail messages. Depending on the rules of the specific service provider and the amount of mail server space allotted to each customer, messages and their attachments often couldn’t exceed one or two megabytes in total size.

Now, with larger servers and the popularity of broadband connections that can transfer data much more quickly than dial-up modems, many providers have increased their maximum message size to 5 or 10 megabytes. That permits multiple pictures, small audio files or even short video clips to be easily attached to a message. Check with your Internet service provider for its attachment-size limits.

Keeping your photos on the small side is not a bad idea anyway, as they download more quickly and usually display better when opened by your recipients. (Sending photos with resolutions larger than the computer monitor’s resolution can cause the image to fill up the screen.)

If you don’t want to spend time in Photoshop shrinking copies of your photos just to e-mail, you can have Windows or Mac OS X reduce the image size for you.

In most recent versions of Windows, right-clicking on a picture file, going to the Send To option and choosing Mail Recipient brings up a dialogue box that offers to shrink the image size and attach it to a message.

In the iPhoto program that comes with Mac OS X, you can select the photos you want to send, click the E-Mail button at the bottom of the window, and then choose the new size for your picture attachments.

If you plan to upload your photos to a Web site or send in an email, shrinking them to a more practical size would be a good idea. There are countless tools that can do this, but your best bet is one that can resize a batch of photos at a time. The aptly named Picture Resizer does exactly just that. Just drag your photos to its icon, and it will create smaller versions of your original photos while leaving the originals intact.