Pixiq

There are tons of ways to share your digital photographs across the Internet. While many of you would likely be happy just posting them to Flickr or Facebook we still come across the occasional person that requires images sent via email (thanks Grandma!). Besides, there are some things that we just don't want to share with the whole world.

How To Attach A Photo To Email

Sending a photo over email is one of the easiest and most popular ways the general public passes photos back and forth to each other. This is especially true amongst family members.

Size Your Photos

In the past it was really only possible to send highly compressed low-res images over email. That's not the case anymore. Most of the free popular email providers allow attachments as large as 10 MB or larger. That's enough space for a dozen or so high-resolution JPGs. Nice.

The first thing you'll want to do is size it (or them) accordingly. How big can you go? You have two factors to consider. The first is your email provider and the allotted size per email. The second is the recipient's. If you send an email with an attachment that's too big to receive it'll bounce back.

Here's a quick reference guide of the most popular free email providers:

• Gmail - 25 MB
• Yahoo! - 25 MB
• Microsoft Live (Hotmail) - 10 MB
• AOL - 25 MB

If you're unsure what provider the recipient uses it's probably safe to just aim for 10 MB.

All that's left is a little math. If I'm sending 10 photos to my cousin in Florida and she uses Hotmail my goal is to stay below 10 MB. It's important to remember to aim a little under the actual limit to leave room for the text and the other stuff that gets sent along with the photos. So I might aim for 9 MB total just to be safe. Divide 10 photos by 9 MB and you get .9 MB or 921.6 KB per image (remember that 1 MB = 1024 KB). Isn't math fun?

Easy tip: Just size your photos to 1 MB and send one less photograph than the allotted limit.

Use whatever image editing software at your disposal to resize your images to the appropriate size.

Then it's as simple as hitting your "attach" button on your email provider and finding your images to attach.

Hint: I tend to put images that I'm going to email in a folder on my desktop. If you do this make it a copy of the JPG so you can just delete them when you're done without losing your original images.

Don't forget to hit that send button!

Did I miss anything? What other ways can/do you use to send digital photos to someone across the Internet?