Sending pictures is one of the most enjoyable and social things you can do with email, but one of the most annoying things you can do is send your pictures as huge email attachments or files.  Whether it is virus concerns or lack of time, your email recipients often do not want to open email attachments.  Add many attachments and the chances of your email being viewed goes down considerably.  Those email recipients with slow Internet connections will also be inconvenienced when waiting a long time for large emails to download into their mailbox.  Some email recipients may have limited email storage space and you can be contributing to filling up their mailbox so that they can no longer receive any email.  Another annoying practice is to send pictures with huge image screen sizes so that the email recipient must scroll through the email in all directions in order to view the full picture.

There are ways to get pictures in front of your email recipients without sending attachments.  One-way is to transfer the files to your website using a file transfer protocol such as FTP or an online photo sharing website, and then email links to the pictures so that the email recipient can download or view the picture at the website.  The advantage to this method is that it allows the email recipient to obtain large picture files for printing on their printer or at their favorite store kiosk.  The disadvantage to this method is that it requires using a website to store your pictures and also requires significant effort on your part and possibly your email recipient's part.  The email recipient may also fear having to look through an entire album of baby pictures (grandparents excluded).

If you just want to send pictures by email for viewing only, with the least amount of effort on your part, and literally no effort or worry on the email recipient's part, you need to send embedded pictures inside of your email.  Using embedded pictures is another way to send pictures by email without attachments.  The embedded pictures should also be reduced in physical size as well as image screen size so that the emails are smaller and do not require your email recipients to scroll through huge images in order to view them.

Many email applications will allow you to embed pictures inside your email, but most are hard to work with and make adding captions to the pictures or changing the order of the pictures inside of your email a chore.  Most do not reduce the size of the pictures before adding them inside your email, so the problems of large email and picture image size still exists.  An additional problem with most email applications is that email cannot be sent easily to multiple recipients one by one without effort on your part.  This is important because some email providers will reject email containing embedded pictures that has been sent to multiple recipients as Spam.

Some specialized email applications such as Easy Picture Email are designed specifically for adding pictures to your email without using attachments with little effort on your part.  Editing picture captions and changing picture order is simplified with a few mouse clicks.  Easy Picture Email automatically reduces the embedded picture sizes for you to solve the large email and image viewing size problems.  In addition Easy Picture Email sends the email to your list of email recipients one by one to avoid Spam rejection.

About the Author:

Patrick DiRienzo (http://www.patdirienzo.com) writes Windows Internet applications to make doing tasks on the Internet easier.  He is the author of "Easy Web Page Watcher" and "Easy Picture Email".