A customer recently complained that his email program was crashing every time he tried to send photos taken with his digital camera to friends and relatives. After a bit of investigation, I discovered the problem.
He was, on the surface, doing everything right. Transferring the pictures from the camera to his computer was a task he had mastered and he knew how to properly attach the pictures to an email. After watching the process fail a few times, I decided to look at the pictures, themselves, and that’s when I discovered the source of his problem.
The file size of each individual picture was huge, much too large to be sent as an email attachment. He was taking pictures at the highest resolution his camera would provide. This made the file size of each picture around 70 megabytes (MB). He was then attaching three or four of these large files to an email and attempting to send it to multiple recipients.
However, email was never designed as a means of sending and receiving large computer files. As you may have experienced, large email attachments can seriously slow down the entire email process. If too many people decide to email too many large files at the same time, an email server (a computer dedicated to “serving” up email) can simply choke and shut down.
Because of this, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) put size limits on email attachments. For my customer’s ISP (Cox), the size limit is 10 MB per email. Attempting to email anything in excess of this size will result in failure. Other ISPs may have different email size limits.
My customer decided to deal with these limits by changing the file size of his pictures. He already had Photoshop Elements (a good program) installed, which allowed him to resize his pictures down to a few MB each. This is a perfectly acceptable solution for pictures that are going to be viewed on a computer screen; they will look just fine. The only time most folks really need super-high resolution photos is if they are to be printed. You know, like, on paper; people still do that.
Another good (and free) program that allows you to resize photos is called GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program). It can be found at www.gimp.org. GIMP is also a great, all-around drawing and graphics-manipulation program, and has many other uses besides resizing photos.
Resizing files to be sent via email is all well and good, but what if you need to keep the original file size and still have someone get it remotely? Two really neat, free programs, YouSendIt and Dropbox, will get the job done.
YouSendIt (www.yousendit.com) is probably the easiest solution to implement. You setup a YouSendIt account, upload your big file (up to 2,000 MB) to your YouSendIt folder and then email a link to whoever you want to have the file. They simply click on the link and get the file. I used this method recently to send a high-resolution photo that was 30 MB in size. It was easy for the recipient to handle and it worked great.
Dropbox (dropbox.com) is more suited for people who frequently need to access the same files from many different devices, such as multiple computers, smart phones and even Macs. It is also used by people who regularly need to share large files with the same recipients. Everyone in this scenario needs to setup a Dropbox account and install the Dropbox software on their computer, complete with usernames and passwords.
Once each computer has been configured, file folders are made and then “synchronized.” This means the same files show up on all of the different devices. Synchronization occurs frequently, so that when a new file is added to one computer’s Dropbox folder, it automatically shows up on all the other computers.
YouSendIt and Dropbox are super-handy, easy to use programs. They both have paid versions available, too, for “power users,” but you may find the free versions do everything you need.