Filed under: E-mail, Google, Beta
Gmail finally lets you insert image in messages
In order to insert an image you'll have to have "rich formatting" turned on. Once it is, you should notice an image icon squeezed between the emoticon and link icons. Click it and you can upload an image to post in the body of your message. That's it.
Now can somebody explain to me why this is in the experimental "labs" section instead of being a standard update to the Gmail interface? Maybe it needs more testing, but really, Gmail has been around for 5 years. You'd think Google would have been able to work out the kinks in this feature by now.

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bill said 10:33AM on 4-10-2009
All the stuff in labs is built by folks in their 20% time so this is, undoubtedly, how they test each feature on a larger scale. Undoubtedly this will become a standard feature eventually
It seems like the core focus of the gmail team is working on the backend of Gmail and not so much on the front end (though they do maintain a lot of different UI's for accessing your mail).
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Marc Savoy said 1:29PM on 4-10-2009
This is indeed a handy feature that has been a long time in coming. The inability to insert images directly into the body of email has vexed me for years, the solution of which I resolved on my own when discovering that only Thunderbird allowed for images to be copied directly into the body of email.
I uncovered several ways in which I could do the same with gmail, one little known secret was to upload the image to google docs, which allowed for copy and paste directly in gmail,
But this is a most definite welcome improvement
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archer said 1:30PM on 4-10-2009
i've been inserting images in gmail since i started using it, which was pretty much at its beginning. on the web i now use splitbrowser and just drag and drop images into the composition field--previously dragged from separate browser window. and from the desktop, thunderbird.
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Martin-T said 4:38PM on 4-10-2009
I rarely use my GMail account. I tried but never got past some of the limitations. Honestly, how hard would it be for them to allow us to create folders or insert images?
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samuel said 7:02PM on 4-10-2009
Folders are passe and nobody else has the archiving and tagging feature that is supposed to replace folders. I don't like folders and completely conform to the idea of GMail's organisation in this area - its what separates them from the competition.
dc said 6:06PM on 4-10-2009
Wow, this is pretty cool. I'm not sure why it's so difficult to do this but I don't believe Hotmail or Yahoo! mail allow this yet.
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samuel said 7:02PM on 4-10-2009
I'm not to keen on the progress bar, left a message on the feedback forums if anybody would care to comment:
http://groups.google.com/group/gmail-labs-help-inserting-images/browse_thread/thread/2df4c206585309db#
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Dave Forster said 7:46PM on 4-11-2009
like archer says... just drag and drop images inline
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Crazy Serb said 8:49AM on 4-12-2009
Gmail is great... until you try to sort the messages by date.
Why haven't they still implemented something as basic as that - if I want to view the latest messages on the bottom instead on top, why can't I just click on a "date" column (that still doesn't exist with a proper sortable header) and sort my messages ascending or descending.
How hard is it possibly to add something as trivial as that?!
Jesus...
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Quikboy said 8:03PM on 4-12-2009
That's why I don't use Gmail much- it may be nifty in some ways, but it lacks other basic things that I'm using in Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail all the time.
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alnores.75 said 10:15PM on 7-18-2009
How can I import a music file in my new composed mail and have it open and play when the receiver opens their mail? Any music pros out there?
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yourcasaponte said 3:59PM on 5-08-2009
I was able to do that but now suddenly instead of the image it just showa the icon, why is that?
yourcasaponte@gmail.com
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