Here’s a simple tip that most people probably know, but I wasn’t all that sure it would behave the way it does, without proving it through trying it out. If you’ve been adding pictures to email (either by Inserting from the new ribbon in Outlook 2010, or by pasting in an image, maybe one captured from the screen), it’s sometimes possible to end up with a huge message.
The tip is, if you add your image, then click the “Save” icon in the top left of the mail (which drops a copy in your Drafts email folder), you can then see the size of the message by looking at its properties: open the message up, and look on the File menu/backstage…
The above was from an image added to an email from a SharePoint site storing pictures from an event, and the picture was large – 2,736×3,648 pixels in fact. Now rather than trying to resize such a huge picture in a paint program, just let Outlook do the work by resizing it in-situ. In this example, I simply clicked the image, then dragged the top-left corner of the image down-and-right, since the picture was way too big to even fit on one screen.
After only 3 resizing drags, the image is now much less wieldy:
(take a bow, Ana Rosales and Shaun Frohlich, pictured… they were playing the part of the blushing bride and the proud father-of-the-bride in a murder-mystery game).
Saving and re-inspecting the size, still shows up as 4Mb but after sending, I can see it shrunk rather dramatically…
