Two Quick Ways To Edit Email Images (1 for Mac, 1 for PC)

Inserting images into emails requires, in almost all cases, that the images satisfy some sort of limitation on their width and height. Especially the width! Sometimes you'll have an email template which requires that they are a specific number of pixels wide, or perhaps a maximum number of pixels. Even without restrictions, say when you are just creating an email message from scratch, we typically don't want to have the message be too wide. After all people will be viewing email in a number of formats... a web browser, an iphone, various email clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.

One way to increase the odds that as many people as possible view the message correctly is to have compact, reasonably sized images in your emails, and to control those sizes yourself! Don't leave it to chance, like leaving it to the user's application.

So you may need to resize and/or crop your images before composing your emails. In some cases a simple resize will be all you need, but maybe you have a big image from your camera, that, instead of or in addition to resizing, you want to crop. (Cropping means using only part of the image). Here's how to Resize and Crop for two platforms: 1) Mac, 2) PC.

FOR THE MAC
Modern Macs (OS X) come with Preview.

If you're a regular Mac user, you know this application. It's the default app for opening up PDF files, and many image formats like JPEG. But Preview can also be used for editing images. So open up your image in Preview.

Customize your toolbar to show the editing tools.

You'll want to have at least the Crop and Select buttons added. (Resize is not an element on the toolbar, but the menu.)

To crop, hit Select, and then make your rectangle of your chosen size and placement. Then hit Crop!

To resize, go to Tools->Adjust Size. Select the dimensions you want. You can do this for the original image or a cropped image. Also, you can keep the ratio of the dimensions of your original image ("Scale proportionally" - almost always the best option), or change them so there's a "stretch" to one of the sides. The lock linking the width and height reflects the "Scale proportionally" checkbox.

You can choose to Resample the image or not... a lower sample reflects a lower filesize, which is preferred until it gets to the point where the image doesn't look good anymore. Space is limited with Cooler Email, but we don't want you to sacrifice quality.

Remember to "Save As..." if you want the new image to be a separate file, and simply to "Save" the file if you want to replace the original.

FOR THE PC
For the PC I use a software program called Faststone Image Viewer, which is free (but you can donate if you like!). Tim Tringali of the South Florida chapter first introduced me to this. Download it at http://www.faststone.org.

Faststone is great for navigating thru images on your PC. Once you find the one you want to edit, a double click on it opens it up in full screen mode; then a right click on the image brings up the menu which will lead to "Edit", which leads to the features we're talking about here.

To crop, choose "Crop Board".

You can immediately save this cropped image to a file via the "Lossless Crop To File" button, or, if you want to pull this temporary image into another application, "Crop To Clipboard".

To resize, choose "Resize/Resample".

In almost all cases, you'll want to keep the "Preserve Aspect Ratio" checkbox selected; otherwise you'll get a stretch on one side of the pic that will look unnatural (for real photos).

Remember to "Save As..." if you want the new image to be a separate file, and simply to "Save" the file if you want to replace the original.