Digital cameras today produce very high resolution images, which is fantastic for printing, but higher quality image files means larger file sizes, and these days images aren't quite as portable as they used to be. Fortunately, Outlook has a great feature to reduce the size of image attachments for you.

I remember being able to store dozens of photographs on a single compact disk when I bought my first digital camera way back in the year 2002.  It was a Canon Powershot G2 and it came with a 32MB flash card, which was considered a generous amount of storage at the time.  My next Powershot camera a few years later shipped with an 8GB flash card which can store thousands of hi-res images!  Even my trusty Droid has an 8 megapixel lens and 16GB of storage! These days even a low-end consumer point & shoot camera takes photos at around 8 megapixels and figuring out how to store and share years of images is a challenge. My kids are already amused about my stories of ancient technology, like film cameras and disposable flash bulbs.. remember those?

Images are pretty big these days, and many email clients only accept messages that are 10-15 MB, which means if you are sending high resolution photos you might only be able to attach a few, and that depends on how compressed your images are (that's a whole different story altogether). You can have Outlook shrink your attachments by reducing the resolution of the images for the recipient.

Reduce the Resolution

Let's start with a new email message in Outlook.

Go to the Insert tab and click Attach File or you can also drag and drop image files to the message.

In the message window, click the File tab. Under Image Attachments, click Resize large images when I send this message.

Click on the Messages tab to go back to your email. When you send the email, Outlook will automatically resize the attachments to a maximum resolution of 1024x768. For an idea of how big that is, the BrightWire Networks website's width is right around 960 pixels wide from side to side.

Shortcut: The Send To Option

You can also right-click on images on your computer and go to Send To, and select Mail Recipient. This will give you an option to adjust the size. Like the method above, it won't change the size of your original image, but let you send a smaller version through email.

Looking to get more from your email, or introduce new email solutions to your business to improve productivity and communication effectiveness? Contact BrightWire Networks at 360-528-6017 and ask us about our small business email solutions!