Tech Features

E-mailing lots of digital photos: New web services can help

By Jay Dougherty Jan 14, 2006, 12:12 GMT

Sending family snaps like these can be tricky if you have lots of them to email.

Washington - Digital photographs are fun to receive by e-mail. The problem is that it's too difficult to understand how to send photographs properly.

That's because photo files are large - often too large to display properly in the body of an e-mail message. And sending large numbers of digital images is impractical.

Often a recipient's e-mail storage space is limited, and a mailbox full of digital photographs can quickly generate 'out of space' errors.

Last year, two programs - SendPhotos (http://www.sendphotos.com/Products/SendPhotos) and Google's Picasa (http://picasa.google.com/index.html) - made the job of e-mailing photographs a lot easier.

With each of these applications, you can navigate to photos stored on your hard drive, select the ones you wish to send, and let the programs do the job of resizing the photos, embedding them into the body of your e-mail message, and sending them out.

The programs work well, with SendPhotos offering more options than Picasa when it comes to laying out your embedded photographs, annotating them, and choosing colourful themes as backgrounds.

But neither program makes it feasible to send large numbers of photographs in their native formats attached as files, for example. Even if you wanted to zip up a bunch of photo files manually and send them to someone by e-mail, your recipient would not be able to receive them because the files would likely exceed the storage limitations imposed by most e-mail providers.

A new Web-based service called YouSendIt (http://www.yousendit.com) has a nifty way around this problem. This free service allows you to send someone files of up to 1 gigabyte (GB) in size, regardless of how much storage their e-mail provider allots them.

The site couldn't be easier to use. You just browse to YouSentIt, type the e-mail address of your recipient into the Recipient Email Address(es) box, optionally provide your e-mail address, type a note, and then click the Browse button to locate the file you wish to send.

You can send only one file at a time, so if you'd like to send a large number of photographs, use a compression program such as WinZip (http://www.winzip.com) to move - or 'zip' - the files into one large archive file.

Once you've identified the file you wish to send, simply click the Send It button on the YouSendIt Web site, and you're done. YouSendIt then uploads your file to one of its computers and sends an e-mail message to your recipient, informing him or her that a file is waiting to be downloaded.

Your recipient downloads the file in the same manner that any other file would be downloaded, thereby avoiding huge files clogging up an e-mail server or inbox.

YouSendIt is free thanks to paid advertising that appears on the upload and download pages. You don't even have to register with the site.

You can, of course, use YouSendIt to send large files of any type, but digital photographers who would like to move large numbers of files from one person to another will find it particularly useful.

Another, similar service is Putfile.com (http://www.putfile.com). Putfile, like YouSendIt, enables you to upload your photographs or digital videos to its servers.

The storage maximum, however, is 10 megabytes (MB). Once uploaded, you receive an Internet address - for example, http://putfile.com/yourname. You then send that address to your e- mail recipients, and when they browse to the site, they can download your files.

The large photo sharing Web sites such as Shutterfly (http://www.shutterfly.com) and Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) also offer unique flexibility in e-mailing digital photographs.

With these services, you create personal online photo albums. Once created, you simply e-mail a link to the album, and your friends or colleagues can browse at their leisure. Your recipients will not, however, have access to the original photo files themselves.

These services also, however, allow your recipients to order selected prints if they wish. This is a popular feature among family members who live far apart from one another.

Recipients can receive traditional photographic prints of images that you send them, and you're relieved of the stress of printing multiple photographs that may not be wanted by all of your recipients.

Currently Flickr is operating the print service from the United States only, but the site plans to offer printing services in more countries soon.

With digital image files getting larger with each new camera release, the problem of e-mailing large photo files or many photo files will only get worse. Thanks to services such as those discussed here, though, your problems are largely solved for now.