Digital Photo Tip: Optimizing For Email

One of the great advantages of digital photography is the ability to easily share your photos with others. In addition to making traditional style prints, digital images can be posted on websites, uploaded to digital personal organizers, displayed on cell phones and emailed. In my business I email photos on a regular basis. I email photo submissions to publishers, proofs to commercial clients and archived image samples to stock photo buyers. But it isn’t just professional photographers who email lots of images. I also email shots of my kids to the grandparents and photos I took out skiing to my friends. Emailing digital images is most likely the number one thing that people using digital cameras do with their photos and yet many people don’t have a clue how to optimize their photos for best email performance.

         The most important consideration when emailing photos is image size, especially for those of us with dial-up Internet connections, but also for those with broadband. If you set your camera to take images at a size that’s right for email then they are too small to make good prints, but if you try to email full size images they take a long time to send and don’t even fit on the screen for viewing. The solution is resizing. Most cameras these days come with software that can easily help you resize your images for email. It is also easy to resize images in image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop. However you go about sizing your photos, here are a few tips that I follow to make sure that I’m not the guy emailing photos so large that they overfill inboxes, take several hours to download and can’t be viewed without scrolling around. These tips only apply to photos that are intended to be viewed on screen but not printed. Print size files need to be large to give good print quality.

First, I like to size my photos so they are about 500 pixels on the longest side and have a resolution of 72 DPI (dots per inch). This enables them to be viewed on smaller monitors and even within the email message window without opening them full screen. 72 DPI is important because that is about the maximum resolution that a monitor can show. Images for print often need 300 DPI or more, but this is a lot of extra information that doesn’t make the image look any better on the screen. A 300 DPI image that is 500 pixels on its longest side contains 16 times more data than the same size image at 72 DPI.

         Second, I save the resized images to be emailed with a different name in a separate email folder. This way I don’t change the original image file and I can safely delete the resized images from the email folder when I don’t need them any more without accidentally losing the originals.Â

Third, I save the email images as JPEG (.jpg) files and set the quality to medium (about 5 on the Photoshop scale) to compress the files even more. These steps ensure that I am emailing the smallest files possible and that they send quickly, don’t fill up all the space in someone’s inbox and can easily be viewed on screen.

         One more tip if you are using software like Photoshop is to apply unsharp mask (Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask) to the final sized image before saving and sending it. When you downsize an image it loses some detail that can be brought back with a little sharpening. Good luck and happy emailing.