Helderberg Photographic Society

Several of our members use Apple Macs and have experienced problems with their images being automatically resized when they mail them in for competitions or evaluation. While I have no experience of using a Mac, a colleague of mine does and I asked him to help me figure this out. Here are the conclusions we reached.

Do not use the e-mailing feature of your image management program.

Resize your images with your software of choice and save them as copies (you don’t want to overwrite your originals) to JPEG files with the correct image resolutions, file sizes and file names (guidelines here). We have a how-to showing how the resizing can be done in Photoshop.

Open the Mail app and compose a new message to helderbergphoto+entries@gmail.com. Once you have entered a subject and any text you want, you are ready to attach your image files, so click the Attach button.

This will open a finder window that you can use to navigate to and select the image that you want to attach. Make sure that Send Windows-Friendly Attachments is checked and click the Choose File button.

You can select multiple images in the finder window by Cmd-clicking each file you want to attach before clicking Choose File. Your images are now attached to the mail message and you can send it without worrying that your images will be resized. The mail app will not specifically recognise the attachments as images; the attach feature can be used to attach and send files of any type.