My Mom's Guide to Using iPhoto 2 A step-by-step guide to the everyday features of iPhoto.

Sharing via eMail

One of the most common ways to share your photos is by sending them through eMail. iPhoto makes it easy for you to prepare your photos and include them in an email.

To do this you must already have eMail set up on your computer, and know how to address and send a message.

The most common challenge of emailing your digital photos is that the high-quality images that come out of you camera are very big. It's very common these days for digital photos to be over 1500 pixels wide. That's almost twice as wide as many computer screens.

Bigger pictures mean better picture quality. And that's good when you want to print them out on paper. But the bigger the picture, the longer it can take to send via email. It can be time-consuming when sending at your end, and also when receiving at the other end.

Plus, all this high-quality is not really needed for a picture that your friend is only going to look at on their computer screen.

So it's a good (and polite) idea to reduce the size of your pics before sending them.

The good news is that it's easy to have iPhoto temporarily reduce the size pictures that you want to email, and it will also automatically move them into your mail program and create a draft message.

Here's how it's done.

1. In the Organize view of your Photo Library locate the photo you want to eMail.
2. Click on the photo. A blue frame will appear around it.
3. Click on the eMail icon at the bottom of the screen.
4. In the window that appears, use the menu to select the size that you want for your photo. (I recomend Medium or Small.) Leave the other settings untouched.

   Remember, this is a temporary change. The size of your original photo with be unchanged.

5. Click the Compose button.
6. iPhoto will transfer you to your email program and create a new draft email with your photo already pasted into it.

   Depending on your email program the photo may be listed as an attachment, or it may be pasted into the body of the message. In either case your picture will go along with the email.

7. Fill in the To: field with the email address of the recipient.
8. Send the email. Depending on how your email works this may be with a Button click or a Menu item.

Send more than one photo at a time.

If you have more than one photo to send, you can attach multiple pictures to a single email.

In Step #2 choose more than one picture by holding down the Command key while clicking on each of your choices. The blue frame will appear around all of your choices. Now continue with the steps above.

Note: You should think twice about attaching too many photos to a single email. Having alot of pics in a single email can be inconvenient for your recipient. Three or four is a good maximum.

Edit the email subject.

iPhoto will put some info in the Subject: line of the email for you. But you can personalize things by simply editing the words in the Subject: field before sending.

"Cool pics from Jo's party"

Add some text to the email.

You can also add some descriptive text to the body of the email. Just click where you want your words to appear and type.

"Hi, here's some picture I took at Jo Ann's birthday party. I hope you like them. Mom."

Copyright 2003 by Jack Hodgson userguides@da4.com

Last modified: