10.4: Resize images in Mail prior to sending

Aug 08, '05 09:26:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Tiger only hintThis is a great feature in Mail that I've seen, but never realized what it did until I stumbled upon it today -- you can now resize image files right in the composition window.; no more exporting from iPhoto. When you're composing an email with an image, Mail now provides you with a little drop-down menu in the lower right-hand corner of the window named, aptly, Image Size. The default value is Actual Size, but changing the value to Small or Medium will resize the displayed image and the file size (Large didn't make much, if any, difference). If you have multiple images in the message, they are all resized to the chosen size -- you can't change images individually, but it's still a great time saver.

This may have been obvious for some users, but I always assumed it just altered the preview display and not the file itself (like toggling between viewing "icon" and "in place") - so I figured I'd pass the info along.

[robg adds: Even though this is a hint on an obvious feature, some may have overlooked it. The good news is that it's amazingly convenient. The bad news is that Mail isn't as efficient as it could be when resizing images, and I wouldn't recommend using this feature ... read on for my analysis.]

[robg continues: Why not use Mail to resize image attachments? Well, Mail is quite inefficient at resizing images. For my test, I started with a large, somewhat complex image -- a 1920x1200 version of this picture. When I attached it to a new message, Mail stated that the original was 881KB in size. I then resized the image to each of the three sizes in the pop-up, control-clicked the new image, and chose Open With -> Safari to get the size of the new image. Separately, I then used Photoshop Elements (PSE) to resize the original to those new sizes, saving each as 100% quality JPEGs (via File -> Save for Web). Here are the results:

Just to be sure that Mail wasn't actually doing better than it was saying it was doing, I mailed myself the Small image. It did indeed arrive as a 229KB attachment.

Keep in mind that these results were using JPEG quality of 100 in PSE, which clearly isn't required. As the image shrinks, you can probably reduce the JPEG quality quite a bit without any visual loss in the image. I took the Large image and retested it using an 80% JPEG setting. In that case, PSE got it down to 339KB, making the new image 44% smaller than Mail's effort. The same test with the Small image gave even more dramatic results, creating a file of only 31KB when using 80% quality (which looked the same to my eye, even in the Large image).

My advice? Skip Mail for resizing images, even though the feature is there. For the amount of size reduction being applied, you don't see the benefit in reduced file size. Exporting the same image from iPhoto to a 320x200 JPEG, the resulting file was only 60KB. So even if you don't own an image editor of some sort, you're better off using iPhoto to do your exports for Mail, as you'll save time while sending, and make your recipients much happier.]

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