Series: Digital Photography Workflow for the Beginner

Series: Digital Photography Workflow for the Beginner - How to email images

This is part 4 of 6 in my series on Digital Photography Workflow for the Beginner. In this lesson, I’m going to explain how to email images to friends and family.

Emailing images seems like a simple enough process, and it is. The issue is many folks do not realize that it is not necessary to send a full-resolution, or full-sized, photo when it’s going to be viewed on a computer.

This article will explain the differences between computer resolution and print resolution, and detail a common approach to preparing images to send via email.In technical speak, a widely accepted resolution for viewing images on the computer is 72dpi (dots per inch), while a photo print will typically be 300dpi. Given the multitude of 6 megapixel and above digital cameras on the market today, sending an image at full size and full resolution would yield a 2 Megabyte, or larger, image - that’s big! If one were to receive such an image as an attachment in an email with a standard 56k modem, it would take over 5 minutes to receive! (This reduces to 23 seconds over a standard DSL connection.) Sending a photo unaltered from a 12 megapixel camera (~6 Megabytes) would take nearly 16 minutes with a 56k modem, or 1.2 minutes over DSL!

Clearly, this is not reasonable. Fortunately, most file management tools and photo software will automatically reduce the resolution, and allow you to easily alter the image size when you opt to send as email. I’m going to detail the process using Windows Explorer.

For anyone with a Windows operating system, you can launch Windows Explorer by right-clicking on the Start button and selecting Explore. Since My Pictures is the common place in Windows XP where images are located, you can also pull up your images directly by clicking Start, then selecting My Pictures.

Now, locate the images you would like to send via email and select them by holding <Ctrl> and clicking on the photos. While continuing to hold the <Ctrl> key, right-click on one of the selected photos and choose Send To>Mail Recipient. This will launch a small dialog box where you will have the option of choosing the size of the image you would like to send. By default, Windows will resize to small, but you can select larger sizes by clicking the “Show more options…” link. (Small is suitable for most needs.) Again, the tool will automatically reduce the resolution suitable for viewing on a computer.

Going back to our above examples, the 2 Megabyte image from the 6 megapixel camera would reduce to 40Kilobytes - that’s 2% of the original file size! Time to access the photo now drops to 6 seconds (from 5 minutes) over a standard 56k modem, and less than half a second over DSL! Our 6 Megabyte image from the 12 megapixel camera is now reduced to 2 seconds (56k) and 0.15 seconds (DSL).

As I alluded to above, there are many tools available to assist in emailing images; I tried to detail one as an example that the majority of computer users will have built in to their operating system. My tool of choice is Breezebrowser Pro, which I’ll touch on in a future segment.

chris@clawblog.com

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!