Mountain View, California — Barely four weeks after Gmail released a drag-and-drop feature that made attaching files to emails considerably more convenient. Now, as a complement to that upgrade, Google has introduced a new feature to Gmail that empowers users to drag-and-drop images from their desktops directly into emails.
The latest feature, currently released only on Chrome, and will be available for other browsers soon, automatically uploads the picture, inserts it into your email where you want it, rather than rely on a dialog box to select them as an attachment, and allows you to resize it.
According to a blog post, this application program is an upgraded version of the Gmail drag-to-attach functionality that appeared in April. That concept displayed a large green drop section when you drag a file or files onto the Gmail message.
Now, the currently released image drag and drop is slightly different. You do not even need the “Inserting Images” lab feature enabled for drag-and-drop picture insertion to work. Simply drag an image to the spot where you want it, click the “Change image” link to resize, if needed, then finish up and send it on its way. Neat stuff, and hopefully coming to at least Firefox very soon.
Images can be dropped right into Gmail’s address window for rich-text messages. (Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
This is a pretty minor change, but a handy one.
Webmail is one area in which Google has struggled to overtake its online rivals, Yahoo and Microsoft. Yahoo remains the dominant provider of webmail service, which is a great anchor for keeping users coming back to the site. Constantly improving Gmail is a good way for Google to keep eating away at Yahoo’s user base.
A point worth noting here is that Google has jumped past the beta/lab stage, offering the new option to lots of ordinary Gmail users.
Michael Davidson, a software engineer, explained on the Gmail Blog, though, “We are launching a feature that empowers you to drag images from your computer into a message. You do not have to have the insert image lab enabled for it to work. Just drag the image in, resize it if you want, and send.”
Also, a caveat: because the image is inserted into a rich-text e-mail, recipients will have to act differently if they want to save or otherwise handle the image compared to what they would do with an attached version.
Drag and drop is one of the most intricate new attributes in the effort to revamp HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language, with HTML5. Another one that is coming to browsers, the Files interface, is an excellent for choosing multiple files in a dialog box, which for people like me could be more helpful for adding attachments. Gmail currently uses a Flash-based mechanism for the task so people do not have to go through the hassle of multiple single-file selections.
It is your call whether Google is trying to play favoritism to Chrome users by giving them early access to some cool stuff, or if this is just a new way of testing things out on a small subset of the population. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how long “soon” turns out to be.