Emailing Photos

I am using gmail to send my photos. I have some scanned photos that I want to send or upload. Some of them I can upload or send and some I can't. They are all in jpeg and around 500 KB (all of them are under 1 MB.) How can I modify the photos to send or upload them? When I try to upload to this page I get "upload error, invalid file."

Are you using Gmail through your Mail program, or are you doing this through the webmail interface?

Either way, Gmail has a 25 MB or so limit on each mail message. You are certainly within that size limit.

Whether you're using Mail or the web, you'll still use the option to "Attach a file" and simply attach the file that you want to send to someone. The file must be saved somewhere on your computer and not be in your Trash (trash will not allow you to empty if it contains a file that's been attached to a message).

Sending photos is different than uploading them. Are you trying to upload them to a server or simply send them to another recipient? If you're attempting to upload them using an FTP program to a server, then you may be getting that message if the file name does not comply with the server requirements.

Thank you txtchr. I use gmail independent of Mail. I can attach photos very similar to the ones in question, however the recipient is unable to view those few photos and if they attempt to download them, they just get a bunch of nonsense text. I have also tried to upload them to a server and these photos will not highlight so that I can click on them to upload. As I said, I can't see the difference between the photos that work and the ones that don't. Very frustrating.

What program are you using to scan/edit these photos? After they're scanned, do they open properly using Preview?

Is the receiver on a Mac or Windows platform?

I scan photos into photoshop from an Epson photo scanner and I edit them in photoshop, preview or iPhoto. They do open properly with preview. I sent them to myself, as a test, on a Mac platform. Some I could view and a few were not viewable - these same photos were not able to be uploaded.

We've gotten to the root of the issue: the format that the files are being saved in the program that you're using to edit and/or scan.

Do a test: Open up one of the rogue files in Photoshop. Chances are it will open in a .psd file. Try saving it as a different file name -- use a file name with only alpha or numeric characters and no spaces or special characters, and make sure for your file format option to choose JPEG. Save it in a location that you can find.

Now try to email that file to yourself and see if it works.

Also, Preview does have the ability to save as JPEGs. You could also open the file in Preview, choose File --> Save As --> choose JPEG as your Format. Again, take out anything that's not alphabetic or numeric prior to the .jpeg or .jpg extension (including spaces -- I'm trying to eliminate all possible errors here). Let's see if that works.

It worked!! I didn't have to open up the photos in photoshop. I opened them in preview and saved them with only alpha characters in the file name. How obscure is that piece of knowledge? Thank you so much!!

I had a hunch that would do it. For some reason, it's a throw-back to the old days and when all else fails, drop the all-inclusive file name options and go back to alpha/numeric only to see if that fixes the problem.

As a rule, the only thing that WILL work hands down: alphabetic characters, numeric characters and the underscore (_) and hyphen (-) key. Nothing else.

Glad it worked