Photos with Windows Live Mail

Using Windows Live Mail (which I tend to promote as the standard Windows tool if Outlook is not available) clients can have issues trying to send photos as attachments.

Turns out this is because MS changed the way this works when they introduced SkyDrive (now Onedrive or whatever). They changed the default behaviour when you right click on a photo and select Send to -> Mail recipient to use “Photo Mail” which works in conjunction with Sky/OneDrive to send a reduced version of the picture as an attachment while uploading the full size version to Sky/OneDrive so the recipient can download the larger image if desired. This is why that extra bloody window pops up asking you to log in the Live Mail or whatever - its trying to get you to sign in to Sky/OneDrive if you are not already! If you skip that then the message just gets stuck in the Outbox and jams up WL Mail until manually deleted.

This is all great 1) if you understand it - which the average user does not and 2) if you have and use a Sky/OneDrive account - which the average user does not!

So how do you make it behave “normally” and just attach the damn photo to an email and send it? Read this:

SkyDrive bypass for pictures in email Go to picture source (My Pictures) select pictures (Ctrl-Click for multiples) Click on email (on top of screen) select size (if other than full size desired) Click attach, it should then open in Windows Live Email. It will be in the Sky Drive format Click on one of the pictures Click the format button on top Click the paperclip That cuts out SkyDrive and makes the photos regular attachments. Add email address, type message and send

This (relatively) simple process just allows the user to change the “attachment format” from trying to use Sky/OneDrive to a normal attachment.

Yes, its a pain to have to do this but I have been looking for an answer to this for a while, and here it is!

Cheers

P.S. in case you wonder why on earth people are trying to do this, the answer is “because they can”. They want to look at the picture in Windows Explorer or Photo Gallery or whatever and then send it from there. They don’t understand that life would be a lot simpler if you compose an email and THEN select the attachments. To be fair, this method allows file resizing which is a handy feature...

P.P.S interestingly enough, there does not appear to be a problem if you use Outlook (2013 in my case) as your default email client - it just gets sent as an attachment without any fuss.