Sending Your Digital Pictures By E-mail

You've taken your digital pictures, you've enhanced them till they are very nearly perfect, now you want to e-mail one to your mom. Don't worry, it's not hard.

1. Open your e-mail program (it does not matter whether you have a Mac or a PC, they act pretty much the same).

2. Push the button or use the menus to open a new message. Address it as your normally do. Write your letter.

3. Put your cursor in the body of the message. The technical name for a picture that you include in and e-mail is attachment. Look for a menu that says "insert" or "attachment" (or something very similar) they both mean the same thing. In this menu you will have a number of choices; find the one that says "file" or "image" (or something very similar). You will be asked to locate the file (your picture) that you want to attach. Find it and click "OK".

4. Send it.

Here are a few of things to keep in mind. Most e-mail services set a limit on the size of message that they will accept. 2 megs is typically the largest they will allow you to send. If the combined size of the text of your message and the image attachment exceed this limit, your message will be rejected. If you want to send more than one picture (which you can do, just go through step 3 again for each image) you will need to make them small enough to stay under the limit or send more than one message.

Mac and PC users have different standard image types. There are however, three types that are nearly universal. These are TIFF, JPEG, and GIF. If you save your image as one of these types, the recipient of your pictures should not have any problem viewing them.

Mac users need to remember that PC file naming rules are different. Make sure that your file names are no longer than eight characters, and append them with ".tif", ".jpg", or ".gif" (for example, MyPhoto.jpg or Sunset.gif) so that PC's will know what program to use to view the file.

Well... what are you waiting for?