Friends usually call me in a panic when they've promised to send someone a photo within the next 5 minutes and then they realize they don't know how. And while I'd love to be able to walk them through the process in 30 seconds that's not going to happen.
If we were in the same room, and if I was familiar with all their gadgets, then perhaps it would be different. But there are so many combinations of digital cameras and camera cards and cables and card adapters and email programs and computer operating systems that, barring a miracle, it's just bound to get ugly.
So the time to learn how to email your photos is before you need to.
Here are the main issues. Do you even know where the photo files are on your computer? Do you want the person you are sending them to to be able to print them out or just be able to look at them on their computer? How many are you sending? Because most service providers won't let you send a large number of photos at one time.
The first trick is to get your photos from the digital camera into the computer. And there are a number of ways to do that. The easiest by far is to buy a card adapter from Amazon or Best Buy that plugs into a USB port on the computer. You just put the camera card into the adapter and copy everything onto the computer. The details of doing that vary from operating system to operating system, but it's usually pretty straight-forward and little dialogue boxes pop up on the computer screen to help you along.
As far as sharing the photos, if your computer is a Mac then you're way ahead of the game, because Apple has made it fairly easy to share photos with the native iPhoto software that comes with your machine. The photo below has an arrow pointing to the email icon.
Click on the photo you want to share, then click on the email icon and follow along. You'll be asked to decide how big you want the photo to be and then your email program will open up and automatically attach the photo to an otherwise blank email. Just add any message you want to send along, address it and press send.
The file size you should choose depends on what the other person wants to do with the photo. To print it out at a decent size you should send the original file, for just looking at it on the computer you can use any of the other options. Experiment by sending things to yourself to see how they look.
Those of you on Windows machines are in for a bumpier ride. I know some of you use XP and some use Vista and some use Windows 7. Microsoft has posted directions on their support pages that walk you through the steps. Click on the links below.
With computers there is always more than one way to skin a cat, so there are other ways to attach photo files to email than the ones above. And there are other ways to share photos without using email. But I think the steps above are easiest for people who aren't too tech-savy to understand. And remember, practice doing this before you wind up in a bind.