Understand the problem with E-mailing pictures

Categories: Transfer Pictures

If you’re not that tech savvy, you’ve probably been frustrated by how long it takes to send an email with pictures attached to it. All your other emails seem to work very fast, but when you attach a few pictures it takes forever to send the email. And you might also get some complaints from the people that receive them…that it takes so long for them to download your emails.

What is the problem?

It’s simple: your pictures are very large files and they take a long time to be uploaded into your email server so that they would be sent to the recipient. Usually, a good quality picture taken from a 4 megapixel camera produces a file that is around 1 megabyte in size. So if you attach 3 pictures you have at least 3 megabytes to send…this is very large.

So, even if you have DSL or other fast connection, it is still very slow. Not only because the files are large but also because your upload speed is at least 4 to 5 times slower than your download speed on your internet connection. So, you shouldn’t be surprised if it takes around 2 minutes to send 3 pictures in an email.

What’s the solution?

The concept is simple but the implementation might be a little tricky. The solution is for you to send smaller files. Unless you want the recipient to receive full resolution pictures, you can send them very good pictures that are much smaller in size. Usually a full resolution picture from a 4 megapixels camera gives you at least 1600×1200 screen resolution, which is larger than most screens these days. So, you can easily send a 640×480 picture that can be around 100 to 200k in size. This means it’s close to 10 times smaller so your emails can be sent … 10 times faster.

The tricky part is that you need some software that would take your original pictures and shrink them down before sending them. Most image management software includes this feature either under the email option or under a resize option.

All the software programs I recommend have this feature. Google Picasa, Canon ZoomBrowser and FastStone Image Viewer. Picasa, for example makes it very easy for you to email pictures.

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