Apple has published a tip on re-sizing photos in Mail “on the fly” which was picked up by TUAW (and others).

It points out that if you drag a full-sized photo into a new message window, you can then resize it using the drop-down menu in the bottom righthand corner to Large (1280×800 pixels), Medium (640×400) or Small (320×200) sizes:

Now, obviously, any Mail tip is a good one by definition and any resizing is better than none for your Sent Mail folder, your bandwidth and your recipient, but there is one thing that the tip doesn’t mention.

Mail sucks at resizing images.

A year ago, Rob Griffiths ran the tests and did the sums when the same tip was posted on macOSXHints. He discovered that Photoshop is between 61% and 73% more efficient at the same tasks. Even iPhoto itself does a better job.

Not everyone owns or likes sledge hammer apps like Photoshop, but if you do this a lot, you could consider utilities like Downsize or Scale to Mail, which will resize your images efficiently without the need to fire up the monster.

If you are reading this but for some perverse reason don’t use Mail, resized photos may still be within your grasp. If you use Claris Emailer, GyazMail, Mailsmith, Outlook Express, PowerMail or QuickMail Pro, Simon Jacquier’s iPhoto Mailer Patcher lets you hack iPhoto to set your email client as the recipient of resized photos.

Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, GyazMail, images, iphoto, mail.app, Mailsmith, photos, powermail, resizing

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• iPhoto Mailer Patcher: email pics for (almost) everyone
• Toggle image and attachment display in Mail.app

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 12:58 am and is filed under Apple Mail, Email in general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.