We all have this dad/mom/sister/brother or friend who discovers computers. And one annoying thing (for them and their recipient) is to send/receive mails that are 5Mb. big. Admitting they don’t get an error message because the attachments are too big in the first place.
To avoid some frustration, here’s a quick tutorial for my father to show him how to resize and send pictures all in a row.
The easiest solution I found on Windows is the "Send to" function in the Explorer. Yeah, I tried to push him to use Linux, but well, I wasn’t there to play the IT guy, so the reseller had a better argumentation on this.
There are better solutions now in my opinion, such as Dropbox which runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (and iPhone), and that’s all I need.
The screen-shots are all in French and I translated it without checking every single little detail, but I’m pretty sure the context will help you to find your way out. So, here we go:
You can click any thumbnail to open an enlarged picture, then press the left and right arrow keys to go back and forth, or escape to continue reading the article.
First, open the folder where your photos are with the Explorer. You should end up with the list of pictures, displayed as a detailed list, thumbnails, or other ways, depending on your own settings.
Once this folder opened, use the Ctrl and Shift keys to help you select the right files (with your keyboard or your mouse).
You can see at the bottom right, in the status bar, that the sum of the files selected weights around 28Mb. That certainly wouldn’t fit in any e-mail.
You can then right click on any of the selected files to open up a context dialog where you’ll select the "Send to" sub-menu, then "Mail Recipient".
An then POP! A popup... pops up. You’ll have two options to choose from, before the images are sent to your e-mail client for further writing. The first will resize the pictures while the second doesn’t change anything on the images.
Select the first option (the default) and click on "Display More Options".
You’ll then be prompted to choose between three different common sizes: "Small", "Medium" and "Large". Well... I selected "Medium" here; up to you to choose the one you prefer.
With "Medium" selected, all the images will be resized so that they fit into a box of 800 pixels by 600 pixels. Don’t worry, they won’t stretch but keep the aspect ratio. Vertical pictures in my example will be 450 by 600 pixels big (width by height).
Once all your choices done, you can press OK and let the computer do the dirty work.
It will open up a redaction window from your default e-mail client. In my case: Mozilla Thunderbird. You can (should) change the subject to something more human than a series of weird files’ names. Write your message, fill in the recipient’s address and you’re done! Just click "Send" and...
Your e-mail is a lot more lightweight (970Kb.) and easy to read in any e-mail client. Congratulations! No more bandwidth wasting and happy family all together!