Mail Tip: Photo Browser

Updated December 7th, 2015.

Apple’s Mail program gives you several ways to send digital photos via email. There’s the hard way (make a new email message, then click the paperclip icon, then hunt around for your picture, then give up); the less-hard way (switch to iPhoto, find your picture, select it, and click the Mail icon), the easy way (drag a photo to the Mail icon in the Dock), and the super-easy way: use Mail’s built-in Photo Browser.

Here’s a picture of a new message’s toolbar, with the Photo Browser button circled:

When you click that button you get a palette like this one:

Everything in iPhoto shows up in this palette. So does everything in Photo Booth. You can choose an album, like so:

You can double-click a picture to see it larger, you can search for a picture using the search box at the bottom, you can control-click on a picture to change the view to “View as List.” Here’s what that looks like– could be handy someday.

I like the Icon View but it’s nice to know the List view is available.

Once you’ve found the picture you want you simply drag it into the Mail message, exactly where you want it to be. For example:

That was easy… but there’s one more thing. Look at the bottom right of the message window. There’s a little menu, called “Image Size.” Here’s a better view.

You can click on it and change the size of the image. As you choose different options the message size (shown at the bottom left) adjusts instantly. Pretty neat stuff, really.

So… next time you’re in Mail, and you want to attach a photo, click the Photo Browser button. It makes sending photos unbelievably easy.

Bonus Tip: look for a Photo Browser (sometimes called a Media Browser) in other applications too. You’ll find one in Pages, Keynote, Numbers, RapidWeaver, iMovie, iDVD, Pixelmator, and probably a lot more, but (notably) not anything from Microsoft or Adobe.

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