Emailing Photos

Elements makes emailing your photos a piece of cake. With just a few clicks, the program preps the image(s), fires up your email program, and attaches the image(s) to an outgoing email. (Of course, you can also email images without Elements’ help, and you may prefer that method since you get more freedom to specify settings like file size.)

Note

Elements can prep your image and automatically launch your email program only if you’re using Windows Live Mail (in Windows 7), Vista’s Windows Mail, Outlook Express or Outlook (in Windows XP), or Adobe’s own mail server in any version of Windows. (It’s a bit annoying that you can’t use Windows Live Mail anywhere but in Windows 7, but that’s how Adobe set things up.) On a Mac, your choices are OS X’s Mail, Entourage, or Outlook 2011. The first time you use one of Elements’ email features, you get a pop-up window asking you to choose one of these programs. If you want to change the program later, in the Organizer, go to Edit→Preferences→Sharing.

Elements’ email features don’t work with other email programs like Yahoo Mail or Thunderbird, so if you want to use a program like that, just use that program’s Attach button instead. (In Windows, you can export an image from the Organizer to your desktop to make it easier to find.)

If you use Windows, the Share tab gives you an almost bewildering array of formatting choices for emailing photos: You can send simple attachments or prearranged groups of photos, frame the photos, change their background color, and so on. On a Mac, not so much, unfortunately. Here are your main choices:

• Email Attachments (Mac and Windows). This is the most traditional option, where you send each photo as a standard attachment.

• Photo Mail (Windows only). Elements lets you send emails formatted in HTML, the programming language used to create web pages. This option gives you all kinds of fancy design choices, and your photo gets embedded in the body of the email—it’s basically like emailing someone a custom-built web page featuring your image.

  The catch is that the recipient has to be using a mail program that understands HTML. Most newer email programs fit the bill, but if you’re emailing someone who uses ancient software like AOL 4, then your email formatting won’t appear correctly. An even larger problem, though, is that if your recipient has her email program’s HTML option turned off, then your email doesn’t appear with all its formatting intact. Photo Mail (Windows only) has more info about Elements’ Photo Mail options.

• PDF Slide Show (Mac and Windows). This option creates a basic PDF-format slideshow of all your images. All you have to do is name the slideshow (see PDF Slideshows (Mac and Windows)).

You need to choose the kind of email you want to send before you start. To pick, click the one you want in the Share tab. (You can start from either the Editor or the Organizer, although you get sent over to the Organizer to actually create your email.) The basic process is pretty similar for all the different types and is explained in detail below. There’s one really annoying aspect of sending images from Elements, though: The messages you send include an ad for Elements.

Individual Attachments (Mac and Windows)

To send photos as regular email attachments, just follow these steps:

Note

If you want to email photos that aren’t already in the Organizer, open them in the Editor before you start, and then choose Share→E-Mail Attachments.

1. In the Organizer, select some photos, and then go to Share→Email Attachments.

   You can preselect photos before you start, or add or change them once the Email Attachments panel appears; Figure 17-7 explains how. (You can also start from the Editor, if you want. If you do, Elements includes your open photos when it whisks you off to the Organizer to create the email, so you can email images not already in the Organizer. Once you get to the Email Attachments panel, you can only add Organizer photos.)

   

   Figure 17-7. The Organizer’s Email Attachments panel is pretty easy to use. You can start with one photo or a group, as shown here. To send more photos, just drag the images’ thumbnails from the Media Browser into the Email panel. You can also highlight photos in the Media Browser, and then, at the top of the Email Attachments panel, click the Add button (the green + sign, which is grayed out here). Remove photos you don’t want by highlighting them, and then clicking Delete (the red – sign). Drag your photos in the panel to change their order. (The first photo here shows the red band with a lock on it because it’s open in the Editor, but it’ll get emailed just fine in spite of that.)

   In the Email Attachments panel, below the image thumbnails, is some info that can help you decide how many photos to send and how large to make them:

   • Number of Items. Indicates how many photos you’ve selected to send.

   • Convert Photos to JPEGs. JPEG is the best format for emailing photos, so you can turn on this checkbox to have Elements make JPEG versions of the images you’ve selected. (If the photos are already JPEGs, then the option is grayed out.) If you just want to convert just some of your photos to JPEGs, select their thumbnails before you turn on this checkbox.

   • Maximum Photo Size. This tells Elements how large you want the emailed photos to be. Remember that it can take a really long time to download a large image with a dial-up Internet connection, and many email providers have a 10 MB limit per mailbox. If you need to change the size, then use this drop-down menu to choose a new one.

   • Quality. If you’re just emailing photos for viewing onscreen, then you can get away with a lower Quality setting than you can for photos that the recipient is going to print.

     Below these settings is Elements’ calculation of how large the attachment will be and how long it’ll take to download with a dial-up connection (a useful warning if you’re sending to people with slow Internet connections). When you’re satisfied with the attachment, click Next.

2. Type in a message (optional).

   In this panel, you can change or remove the message that automatically appears in the body of the email, which says, “Here are the files that I want to share with you.”

3. Address the email (optional).

   Decide whether you want to enter the recipient’s email address now. You can:

   • Do nothing. Wait until Elements is through, and then type the address in the completed email before you send it.

   • Select Recipients. Elements keeps a Contact Book—a list of people you regularly email—so you can simply select names from the list. (The box on Elements’ Contact Book has more about this feature.) If you haven’t used Elements’ email feature before, then start by clicking the Edit Contacts button (the little silhouette just above the Select Recipients section) and entering your recipient’s contact info.

   • Edit Contacts. If you want to enter a new recipient or change the information for someone in your list, then click the Edit Contacts button (the silhouette), and enter the new info in the Contact Book.

4. To finish, click Next.

   Elements launches your email program, creates a new message, and attaches the files for you. You can then make any changes to the message or recipient in your email program. (If your files are pretty big for emailing, then Elements displays a warning and suggests burning a CD instead. Since the warning appears for files of 1MB or larger, use your own judgment here. Unless your friends have dial-up connections, a 1MB attachment is no big deal these days, but some Internet Service Providers still limit attachment sizes to 5MB or less.)

Photo Mail (Windows only)

Elements also gives you a ton of options for gussying up your photos if you choose Photo Mail in the Share tab. As mentioned earlier, Photo Mail is actually HTML mail. When you send HTML mail, your message gets formatted using a template, a stationery design in which your photo appears.

Note

Mac folks, there’s no need to fret because you don’t have Photo Mail. If you use OS X’s Mail, you’ve got some pretty fine templates right there. Just start a new message and then click Show Stationery at the upper right of the new message window to see a bunch of Apple-designed formatting choices.

ORGANIZATION STATION: Elements’ Contact Book

The Organizer makes it easy to call up the addresses of people you regularly email by keeping a Contact Book. Any time you send email to a new recipient, you first have to add the address to the Contact Book by clicking the Edit Contacts button (the silhouette) in the Email Attachments panel. (You can also get to the Contact Book by choosing Edit→Contact Book in the main Organizer window.)

Once you’ve got the Contact Book open, click the New Contact button to add an address. Then you can type in a name, email address, phone number, and other contact info. To edit or delete a contact, just highlight it in the list and then click the relevant button.

You can also create groups of names in the Contact Book, for times when you want to send the same photo to several people at once. To do this, click New Group, enter a name for the group, select entries in the Contact Book, and then click Add. The people’s names go into the Members list. To remove a name from the group, highlight it in the Members list and then click Remove.

In Windows, Elements makes it easy to coordinate the Contact Book with your existing address book. You can choose to import addresses from Vista’s Windows Mail, Microsoft Outlook, or Outlook Express, as well as any that you’ve saved as V-cards (a digital business card format) in other programs. Just click Import and choose your source. You can also export your Contact Book addresses as V-cards to use them in other programs. This is another feature that isn’t in the Mac version yet, although OS X’s Address Book can import and export V-cards for you.

If you have a Photoshop.com account, then your Contact Book is stored online, so Elements nags you to connect to Photoshop.com if you try to use it when you aren’t connected to the Internet. If you don’t use Photoshop.com, then your Contact Book is stored on your computer and should always be available to you.

The process for sending Photo Mail is pretty much the same as for regular attachments (Individual Attachments (Mac and Windows)), but in the first panel you can choose whether to display captions along with the photos, and you don’t get the option of converting the photos to JPEGs; Elements controls that.

After you’ve chosen your photos and (optionally) your recipients, the Stationery Layouts wizard (a series of guided question screens) presents a long list of stationery theme categories with several choices in each. The preview window updates to show each one as you click it. You can add a caption to any photo in this window by highlighting the text below the photo and typing what you want. When you find a style you like, click Next Step.

In the next window, you have a choice of several different page layouts. Below the layouts, you can choose a typeface from a list of five common fonts. Click the box to the right of the font’s name to choose a color for the text. You can also customize the frame or border around your photos, as shown in Figure 17-8. Each time you make a change in the left pane of the window, Elements updates the preview so you can see just what you’re getting.

Figure 17-8. The Stationery & Layouts wizard lets you choose from various frame styles. If you pick a style that leaves empty space around the photo, then you can customize the background color of the email. For some styles, you can adjust the padding (the matte-like space between the photo and the frame) and the frame’s size.

When you’ve adjusted everything to your liking, click Next. (Click Cancel if you don’t want to send the email after all, or Previous Step if you want to go back and choose a different theme.) Elements creates your ready-to-send email. You can make any changes to the message and address just as you would to any other email—and send it off like any other email, too.

PDF Slideshows (Mac and Windows)

You can also email a group of photos as a slideshow. Elements uses the popular PDF format, which lets your recipients page through each slide using the free, ubiquitous Adobe Reader program (or, on a Mac, in OS X Preview, if they prefer). They just open the PDF and view the photos one by one. You can create a PDF slideshow from the Share tab in either the Editor or the Organizer if you don’t want to deal with the Slide Show Editor (covered in more detail on The Slide Show Editor (Windows only)).

To create a slideshow, select your photos as described earlier, and then in either the Editor or the Organizer, go to Share→More Options→PDF Slide Show. (If you start from the Editor, Elements sends you over to the Organizer to create your slideshow.) In the PDF Slideshow panel that appears, Elements offers you a choice of sizes and quality, just as you have for sending regular email attachments. Name the slideshow, and then click Next. In the next panel, enter a message or recipients if you like, and then click Next. Elements tells you the size of your slideshow and suggests that if it’s going to be larger than a megabyte, you should consider another route, like burning a CD or using Photoshop.com. Click OK, and Elements generates a standard email message with the slideshow attached.

Note

Although this is the only kind of slideshow you can create in Elements if you have a Mac, don’t forget that you can also make slideshows in iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD if you want something more deluxe.