Dealing with photos in email doesn’t have to be a hassle. Yahoo has one solution and they are calling it PhotoMail. Writes Lifehacker:

Yahoo! is now testing PhotoMail, an Yahoo! Mail add-on that lets you drag and drop photos from your computer or Yahoo! Photo Albums into email messages.

They have a pretty cool looking Flash demo. I decided to try this out by mailing pictures my wife took of the circus the other night. My normal procedure from dealing with pictures is: 1) import to the computer from digital camera using USB, 2) compress the pics using Photoshop, then send along as zipped package. Would PhotoMail save me any time? I decided to find out. After installing the tool, it said I had it installed but it kept taking me to a 404 page.

I didn’t previously have a Yahoo mail account (1GB now, just like Gmail used to be), and so I activated that account. Then I clicked that link again.

Yup, that was it. You’ll just get an error message (as of this writing anyway) if you haven’t activated your free Yahoo email account.

So next I composed an email to send to my wife and dragged all the circus photos into the window. Next it added a nice thumbnail gallery (shown above). I played around resizing. There are three thumbnail size options: small, medium and large. It tells you the size of the pictures and then starts uploading them, complete with a nice progress meter:

Now to check with my wife and see how it turned out on the recipient side? Looks pretty good and the thumbnail gallery is all inline so next I had her forward to me and see if the gallery would stay inline. It did:

Final test was to click from one of the images and see the bigger version:

Nice! I checked out the photograph size and the original was still 184K, which wasn’t exactly web friendly. Using PhotoMail one could quickly create and send galleries, but this really hasn’t advanced my goal of having the source pictures made web size friendly. 184k still isn’t very web friendly, but 30k or less would be. It does compress somewhat because the original image shown above was 334k. It seems to me that without more compression that photoalbum space will fill up rather fast, but then according to the Yahoo Photos help there is unlimited space so this is a non-issue as far as Yahoo is concerned anyway. However, if you want to use these photos on your own websites you’ll still need to compress them (that is, unless you don’t want a huge bandwidth bill). Maybe I missed an option somewhere to compress photos? I realize this functionality is outside the scope of the tool, BTW. Anybody see this option/functionality somewhere?

Overally, an interesting tool for quickly and easily sharing photos via email via Yahoo email — it does what it says it will do — quite well. Nice work, Yahoo! < — and finally a place that the exclamation point actually makes sense.

Update: Doesn’t work on Macs yet and has trouble in Firefox. This is an Internet Explorer only gig at the moment, it seems.

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