subject: When quality counts: how to send photos by email without losing resolution [print this page] When quality counts: how to send photos by email without losing resolution
With each new professional quality camera that comes onto the market, the resolution and quality of photographs you can take significantly increases. This is a marvellous thing and means that your images are more versatile, for example enabling you to reproduce them to very large physical sizes. However when it comes to sharing your images, with colleagues, clients, family and friends you will often find that some services can't keep up with these advances, particularly email. Email is not really designed to let you send large files.
Most email servers can't handle photo email attachments because of the size of the files, either because you are sending lots of photos by email which adds up to a lot, or because you are sending a few very high quality images. Doing either creates a two-fold problem. When sending a large email attachment the maximum size depends not only on how large an attachment your own mail system will allow you to send but also on the size that the recipients' mail system will accept. Here are the limits some of the major systems have:
Gmail - 25Mb
Windows Live Hotmail - 10Mb
Yahoo! Mail - 20Mb
The major email server programs have the following default limits for large email attachments:
MS Exchange 2007 - 10Mb
Send Mail - 2 Mb
When you consider the following table that gives you the typical file sizes for photos taken on a Canon EOS 5D (12.8 Megapixels) you will begin to see why sending your photos by email is problematic.
Resolution Quality Approx. file size
RAW
4368 x 2912 RAW 12.9Mb
Large Fine 4.6Mb
4368 x 2912 Normal 2.3Mb
Medium Fine 2.7Mb
3168 x 2112 Normal 1.4Mb
Small Fine 2.0Mb
2496 x 1664 Normal 1.0Mb
Even emailing one high quality RAW image will cause problems for most mail servers. When you start thinking about sending multiple lower quality images then sending these files is still going to be a headache. The end result is that your email program going on strike or emails being bounced back as undeliverable.
So what do you do? Well one solution is to compress the photos so that they are smaller in size. However if you need your images to be very high resolution then this is not a feasible solution as you will lose quality. If you are also planning on sending lots of photos by email you are still very likely to end up with size issues anyway and will have to send each photo in a separate email which will be a highly laborious task!
A much more time-efficient and user friendly approach is to use a large file sending service that enables you to send big files with minimum hassle. The basic idea is that you send an email using their web-based services, uploading your photos. The photos are then put on a server and your recipient is sent an email from the service with a link to the photos, including your original message. The recipient(s) then click on the link to download the file(s). This gets round the limitations of your and your recipients mail servers and enables you to send the highest resolution and highest quality images.
There are many large file sending services available with the most well known being YouSendIt and Tonsho. They both offer free and paid accounts with the paid accounts allowing you to send more files, giving you larger storage space and enabling you to brand up the download page if you are a business customer.
The major differences between each of these services concern the maximum size of file you can send and how easy it is to upload and download multiple files. While the typical size of file you can send through one of their free accounts is fairly standard at around 100Mb, the differences are for their paid accounts. YouSendIt offer a maximum size of 2Gb while Tonsho enables you to send files up to 5Gb.
Concerning ease of upload and download, unlike YouSendIt, Tonsho provides a bulk upload and download service so users don't have to click one by one on each photo to upload or download the files and they also offer thumbnail views of the files.
Of course with these services you are not limited to sending photos, but can send any sort of file you like. If you are unsure of which service is going to suit you the best and whether you do want to put your hand in your pocket, starting out with a free account, even if it is just to do some trial sends of smaller files is probably the best place to start. You can then get a feel for the service and its usability before making your final decision. Try a free account now
