How To Attach Images To Mail Messages On a Mac

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you different ways that you can add a photo to an email message on your Mac. Now occasionally I'll get somebody asking me how they can attach a photo to an email message. Well of course there's a way to do this. In fact there are many different ways to do this. So I want to use this as an opportunity to talk about ways that apps can work together on your Mac. So for instance here I am in Mail and I've started composing a new email message. And let's say I want to insert a photo into this message. Now this photo can come from the Photos app or perhaps it's a file that you just have in a folder in the Finder. Let's start with the Photos app. When you want to get two apps to work together you should always think about four different primary methods. The first is to use a command that will directly do what you want like inserting a photo here in this message. Sometimes this is called Insert. Sometimes it's called Import. Sometimes it's called Attach. Alternatively you could look for a way to drag and drop items from one app to another. Third you can usually go to one app and copy an item and then go to another app and then paste what you have copied at that location. And fourth there are often ways to use the Share menu or Context menu to take an item and send it to that other app. So for instance in Mail here I want to insert a photo. Let's try the first method, a command. If I look around and go to the File menu I'll see right there I've got Attach Files. There's even a keyboard shortcut. Sometimes commands like this are even in the toolbar as well. And sure enough in Mail there's actually a button in the toolbar by default to allow you to attach a file. Both this button and the File menu will do the same thing. They will bring up a file dialog. But in this case we want to get a photo from the Photos app not from a file. The way to do that is when you're in dialog like this where you're selecting a file to import, insert, or attach look in the left sidebar. Usually at the bottom you'll see a Media section and one of the items there will be Photos. This will give you direct access to your Photos library. You can then browse through the photos. You can search. You can change your view options if you like. And you can simply select an item like this one. Click Choose File and it will insert that item in. Now let's try the second method, drag and drop. To do that I want to bring up the Photos app. So here I can see my photos in my library in the Photos app and I can still see over here the mail message. You can move the windows around to position them as you like so you can see both locations. Find the item you want and simply drag it from one app into the other. And you can see it does the same thing here. I get the image in my message. The third method remember is copy and paste. So in this case select something here and you can go to Edit and Copy or just Command C and then go to Mail and use Edit and then Paste or Command V to paste it in. And the last method is to share. In this case you would select a photo like let's say this one here and then you can click on this button here in the toolbar which is available in a lot of different apps but you can usually also find it in File, Share. Both get you to the same place, this little menu here that allows you to share the selected item in a variety of different ways. And in this case we have mail as one of the options. So if I selected that it would actually create a new email message here and put that item in there. So that might not be ideal for this situation if we've already been composing an email message in this window but it's a great alternative if you haven't started the message yet. If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash Patreon. Now let's take those four methods and use them to attach an image file. So the image isn't in the Photos app. It's not in our library. It's an independent file. You can use this button or go to File, Attach Files and then you can use this window to navigate to where you want. You can click here to navigate to a recent place. I'm going to use the sidebar here to go to Documents and then down into Images and there is the image that I want and I can choose the file. But I could also drag and drop. If I have the Finder window open like I had the Photos window open before I can simply drag a file from the Finder into Mail. Copy and paste works too. I can select the file, use Edit and then Copy or Command C and then Command V to paste. And Share works as well here. I can click this button here or use File, Share and I can choose to send a copy. So you want to make sure you select that item correctly and choose Mail and you can see how it creates a new mail message and it has that image in there. And all these things work with multiples as well. So for instance, in the Finder I can select this item, Command Click to select this one, Command Click to select a third or I could click one and then Shift Click to select a range and I could drag them all in. I could copy and I could paste them all in and have multiple images pasted at once. Let's look at a third example and you'll see why it's important to understand all four of these different methods. Let's take a screenshot. So let's say I just want to take a screenshot here. I'm going to do Shift Command 5 to bring up the screenshot interface. Under Options, I want to have Show Floating Thumbnail turned on and I'm going to select a portion here. So let's just grab just a little portion of the screen like this area here say and if I capture, I get the floating thumbnail at the bottom. I'll click that and if you try the Insert Import Attach method here, you'll see there's really no way to do that. There's no place here where there's going to be Command in Mail to do it. Some apps like Preview actually do let you insert screenshots but not in Mail. But other options will work. For instance, while I'm looking at this floating thumbnail here, if I use Command C to copy and then I'll just click that trash can here to throw away that screenshot, I can now use Command V to paste it into the message. Likewise, I can use just drag and drop. So I can take the screenshot like before but I'm going to take this thumbnail and drag it into Mail. So drag and drop works and also sharing works. If I capture, I click here, you can see I've got this little Share button right there. I can click it and there's Mail and I can create a new Mail message with that image attached. So using screenshots, the first method, the Insert Import Attach method doesn't work but the other three do. It's important to know about all of them because in some situations, some of them won't be available and in some situations, some are just far easier to use than others. Now, while those four methods can be used in a lot of different apps, there sometimes are additional methods that are specific to an app. In Mail, you've got this special Media button here. You can click there and then choose Photos or if Photos is the only option for you, it just automatically opens up this window and you could browse through your photos. You can actually look in places like Favorites and People and such. You can do a search and from here, you can drag and drop into your message. You can also bring this window up or close it in Window, Photo Browser. Now, I can't do a video talking about images in Mail messages without pointing out a very important feature. If you have an image attached to your message, look very carefully for this image size setting that will appear. You've got Small, Medium, Large, Actual Size or the Original Image. The difference between these two is Actual Size will compress the image a little bit but leave it the same size. Original Image will not attempt to compress the image at all. If you select one of these like Small, you can see how it makes the image much smaller and in this case, you see the message size is now 37K. Whereas, if I were to choose Actual Size, you can see it's 3 megs and Original Image is sometimes larger, sometimes smaller. In this case, the Original Image is only 2.1 megs. It's a very well compressed image now in HEIC format but Actual Size gets me a JPEG which doesn't compress it as well. I could go to Large and it really doesn't change the image that much. Most people will be perfectly happy to get an image of this quality and you can see the size is a lot smaller. But Medium, you'll start to see it definitely being a smaller image and Small is really tiny. Now, if you're just sending a photo to somebody, it may not matter so much. But what if you're sending a screenshot? Here's a screenshot I took of the whole screen at Actual Size and you can see how easy it is to see what's going on in the screenshot. But if you select Small, you can't even really read the text that's in there. And note that it will remember your setting. So, if you set it Small for a photo and then next time send a screenshot, it's going to choose Small and the person getting your screenshot isn't going to be able to see what you want them to see. So, always pay careful attention to image size and set it appropriately for that particular message. Now, variation on attaching images to an email message is to export them first from photos. And in doing so, you can be very specific about the quality. So, I'm going to say select this photo here, this photo, and this photo. And then I'm going to go to File, Export. I'm going to export three photos here. I can set the type. So, JPEG for maximum compatibility with people with older computers. I can say, oh, I don't want the location information included with these. I'm going to click here and now I can choose the quality. So, I can make a smaller file by choosing Medium Quality instead. And I could also choose a smaller size. So, let's choose Medium Size. And I'll export these just to the desktop as a temporary holding place. So, now I've got these three images here. I could drag and drop these into my email message. I can then choose actual size here. And the actual size still isn't that big because remember I exported them at a specific size and quality. So, you can see all three images will just be 1.1 megs now. And I had much more control over the quality of the images by exporting them first. And obviously, the downside is there are a lot more steps involved. And I can't really finish this video without talking about what I think is a better option than sending images via email. You're just sending these large files to somebody that may have limited bandwidth or slow connection and it may not be ideal for them to just be getting this huge email. Instead, always consider when you've got the photos already in your Photos app, usually in iCloud, you can just select the photos you want. You can then go to File, Share, and share them as a shared album. So, I want to create a new one here. I'll just call this one Test Album. I can create it. If I look down here in Shared Albums, I'll see it there now. And I can go into it. And by using this button here, I can set this up to make it public. Turn these off. And you see I get this link here. So, I could click on that link and this is what others will see when they go to that link. I can control click on this and copy the link. And then in the mail message, instead of putting any attachments at all, send a really short, small message here with just this link in it. And the recipient will be able to click on this link and then view the videos on the web. This is a much better way to share a whole bunch of images with several different people. Instead of sending all these large files around to everyone, you're just sending a simple email with a link or include the link in a text message instead. And it has the added benefit that you could alter that album later on. For instance, I'll add this photo to that album here. You can see it's got a fourth one in there. I don't even have to send the email or message again to anybody. Anyone that goes to the link will now see four images instead of three. So shared albums definitely have a ton of advantages to actually attaching images in an email. But keep in mind all those other techniques like a command, drag and drop, copy and paste, and share, they work in lots of other situations. For instance, bringing images into a pages document, adding a file to a text message, and so on. You find that if you always think about these four methods, you usually can find a way to do what you want. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video click the Thumbs Up button below to let me know. I publish new tutorials each weekday. Hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out.