Mountain View, California — In its relentless quest to improve what is regarded as Google’s real social network, which has always been extremely liberal with the volume of attachments it allows Gmail users to add to their emails, the company has just added a couple of new features in Gmail Labs that can be integrated into the regular Gmail experience when activated as: Inserting Images “Allows you to insert images into a message body. You can upload and insert image files in your computer, or insert images by URLs.”
This latest feature empowers users the power to simply insert images into messages instead of having to attach them. It is a pretty cool and simple tool to use. To activate the function in Gmail settings, enable the Inserting Images lab and save. Once activated, you will see a new icon in the toolbar for inserting images into your email.
“Make sure you are in rich formatting mode, or it would not be displayed on the toolbar,” notes Google’s Kent Tamura. “Click the little image icon, and you can insert images in two ways: by uploading image files from your computer or providing image URLs.”
Clicking on the little icon opens up a separate window, which lets you choose to browse your PC or add an image URL. However, large images will fill up the entire compose screen of the email.
And what is more, Google has also added a little tool at the bottom of the image that enables you to re-size the image or delete it on-the-fly. You can choose between small, medium, large, or the original size.
Google software engineer Tamura notes, “Keep in mind that Gmail does not display URL-based images in messages by default to protect you from spammers, so if you are sending mail to other Gmail users, they will still have to click “Display images below” or “Always display images from…” to see images you embed.”
There are countless other features apart from the Inserting Images in Gmail Labs, such as: YouTube Previews which “Shows a video preview whenever you receive a YouTube link in an email.”, Gmail tasks and Gmail Offline which “Makes Gmail go where the Internet does not. Access your inbox through your browser and use Gmail’s familiar features when you’re offline.”