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How to Email Your Digital Photos

Emailing Your Digital Photos

A few things to remember:

  • Always save a copy of the ORIGINAL photo

  • You can always go down on resolution, but you can never go up.

  • 72 dpi for email and web – 300 dpi for printing

Photo Restoration

Digital Photo Restoration

Restoring old photos is one of the coolest things you can do in digital photography. The best part is that anyone can do it. All it takes is a scanner and a nice image editing program.

Important Photo Restoration Tools

There are many several tools that you just can't do without when it comes to restoring photos.

Cloning tool

Future proofing your new PC

We have talked at length about the upcoming Windows Vista on our show and eluded to it here on the site. Microsoft says that it will come out in the first quarter of 2007 which leaves us about six months give or take. Adam and I had our first look at Vista during this year's Consumer Electronic Show (CES). We weren't impressed. Since then, I have read many Vista articles, reviews, blogs and even downloaded the beta version of Vista. I'm still not impressed.

All that being said, at some point you may want to upgrade to Vista (or its upgrade). I don't recommend waiting for Vista before buying a new PC because I truly believe that Vista will be a flop for the first six or so months (putting us into 2008). BUT, when you are buying a new computer or laptop, you might as well plan a little for the future. Here's what I'm telling callers and clients this month about what to look for in a new computer.

Solving email problems

When you are having trouble receiving or sending email, here are a few tips to help keep the mail flowing.

  • Never assume the problem is on your end. If you were sending email perfectly a few hours earlier or even yesterday, DO NOT CHANGE ANY SETTINGS on your computer. Instead, shut the computer off and try again. If nothing still, shut off the computer and wait until the next day. When you have tried these two steps and still have a problem, then call your email provider to ask what may be happening.
  • If you are receiving email, but are unable to send, check to make sure that your email didn't get stuck in the Outbox. Sometimes we mistype an address and that will stall the email.
  • If you use dial-up and get disconnected from the Internet every time you check email with Outlook Express, click Tools –> Options from the menus. Click the Connection tab and uncheck the box that says "hang up after sending and receiving.
  • Attached pictures are too big when viewing/printing. Use this tip .
  • You receive a Red X where a picture should be. Read our Red X tip here .
  • Again for dial-up users especially, if you get the same email over and over, and no new ones come through, it usually means a 'stuck' email. This occurs when an email is too large to come through quickly and you disconnect before it finishes downloading the email. In this situation, learn to use your email service's web mail function so you can view your email on the web based interface. Then delete any email that is more than 1000 kilobytes (1 megabyte). Or you can read the message via the web based interface.

When it’s gone, it’s gone

Adam eluded to a trend that he has noticed about failing computers and hard drives lately. Indeed, I have seen the same epidemic. My question to you is, do you really know what the hard drive is and what its function is?

Some computer users point to the box that sits on their desk or floor and call it a hard drive. Others know that it stores data. I think few understand how important and valuable the hard drive really is and why we spend so much time writing and talking about backup. The hard drive, in desktop computers, is roughly the size of a VCR tape. It is a mechanical piece of equipment that has motors, gears and bearings…none of which is made to last forever. Thus the reason for backup.

I love my Treo

Today I helped a couple setup their brand new Motorola RAZR phones. These are do-it-all phones, or at least they do a lot. They have built-in cameras, they do email and Text messaging, they have Bluetooth radios and that's about it.

Motorola RAZR

RAZRs are very popular right now because they are thin and they do a lot. But they aren't very easy to use. Granted, they are some of the easiest cell phones to use, but that doesn't mean that they are easy to use.

In order to check your voice mail, you have to hit the little mail button, then go through a menu to choose voice mail (as opposed to text message, email, and about three other kinds of mail). Everything involved several menus.

Control is Key

I can usually get a 'wow' from many computer users when I show them how to use the Ctrl (Control) key on the keyboard. In combination with other keys it can do fantastic tricks like copy (Ctrl+C), print (Ctrl+P), or save files (Ctrl+S) to name a few. Combine the Ctrl key with a mouse click and you truly get magic. Hold down the Ctrl key while clicking on documents, email, pictures or other multiple to select multiple at a time.

No longer do you have to be relegated to deleting files one at a time or emailing pictures one at time. Use Ctrl+Click to select or highlight multiple options at the same time.

Watch the lights

Since many of us are now using high speed connections to the Internet, we run into new problems. A customer of mine called me today and said she couldn't get email any more. When I asked if she was connected to the Internet, she thought she was. Knowing she had DSL, I asked how many lights were on the DSL modem (thingy from the phone company that connects the computer to the Internet with a cable running from phone line to it, and then another cable from it to the computer). She saw three lights on her particular modem, an Actiontec, which should have a minimum of four lights on it.

The solution:  unplug the power from the modem for about fifteen or so seconds, plug it back in and wait for about a minute or so until the four (or five if wirelss is enabled) light up. We waited, she checked her email and presto, it worked.

Take out the garbage in one step!

I thought that this piece of information was pretty common knowledge, but apparently it isn't so I'm discussing it today. When you delete an email, it gets moved to the Deleted Items folder and accumulates there. When you delete any type of file or document on your computer, it goes to the Recycle Bil and accumulates there unti you empty it.

For email in almost any email program (except AOL), you can RIGHT click on the Deleted Items (Trash) folder and click "Empty Deleted Iterms (Trash)" option. You will then be asked if you are 'sure' that you want to delete all of the trash…click Yes. In Outlook Express, you find this function in the Edit menu as well. Outlook users will find it in the Tools menu, and Mozilla or Thunderbird users will find a similar funciton in the File menu.