Sending photos to prospects or to fellow agents? Take a look at the following guidelines to insure prospects are able to view your pictures and more importantly able to receive them in their inboxes. Even with the recent increases of inbox size for email programs such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc, many consumers still use their ISP’s email accounts that generally have a 2-10 MB capacity. Large images also may not fit the viewer’s computer screen resulting in difficult viewing.

Resize your images - Large files (2+MB) take longer to download, longer to send and will often fill up your prospect’s inbox quickly…so be user friendly to your prospect's Inbox! If you do not have a way to resize or crop your photos, check out Picasa by Google. Picasa is free to download, use and will work with Microsoft Outlook or a Gmail account; allowing you to email your images as soon as you edit them. Picasa will also search your computer for photos and categorize them automatically so you can find them easily. XnView is another free photo editing program that offers a few more editing capabilities than Picasa, but can be less user-friendly.

Send a link to the photo instead of an actual photo attachment – Avoid the hassle altogether. Add a link in your email so your prospect can link directly to your listing photos. Go to the specific listing on your website as a consumer would and copy the URL in your browser’s address field for a direct link to that page.

Let your prospect know you are sending an email with an attachment – If you are sending actual photo attachments, let the prospect know. With the prevalence of computer viruses, consumers may see any attachment as a potential threat and may delete your email before reading it!

Reduce picture quality setting on your digital camera – Most digitial cameras will have the highest quality setting on by default resulting in multi megabyte images. Lower the picture quality on your camera and you will not only reduce the photo file size, but you will free up more space in your camera’s memory for more pictures!

Zip the photos – Zipping a file creates a compressed version of the file that is much smaller than the original file. If you have several large photos that you want to send via email, your best bet is to send them to a compressed folder. To do this, simply select the photo files that you want to Zip. (You can select the entire contents of a folder by choosing the "Edit" menu and then "Select All".) After selecting the images, Right Click on any of the selected images. This will prompt an options menu. Choose "Send to: " and then "Compressed (zipped) File". This will create a single file containing all the images you selected. When you want to email it, add the file as an attachment by simply clicking "Browse" and selecting the newly created .zip file. One thing to note, even .zip files can be too big to email. So make sure you don’t put too many photos in a single .zip file.

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