Image compression not working

[Paolo Marini]

Hello everyone,

I am using Outlook 2007 but don't seem to be able to compress the images.
Here are the steps to reproduce the behaviour.

1. Create a new email message.
2. Press the PrintScreen key.
3. Paste the image in the body of the email (either as Bitmap or Device
Independent Bitmap).
4. Select the image.
5. Click on Picture Tools > Format > Compress Pictures.
6. Select the checkbox "Apply to selected pictures only" (doesn't really
make any difference).
7. Click on Options...
8. Select the first two checkboxes (Automatically..., Delete...).
9. Select the last radio button (E-mail 96ppi).
10. Click on OK and then OK.
11. Save the message (without sending it).
12. Open the Drafts folder and check the size of the image: 3MB!).

Although the PrintScreen is capturing both monitors, there is no reason why
the relevant JPEG compressed image should be 3MB.
Also, even if I didn't try to compress the image, the size would have stayed
the same (3MB).
In practice, the compression options don't seem to make any difference
whatsoever.

Is there something like a registry hack that could have disabled this
functionality?

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Paolo

 

[Roady [MVP]]

That function works as it should. I believe you have the wrong impression of
what this option does; it reduces the size of the image by dropping the
information of the picture that you cropped and sets the current dimensions
as 100%.

You didn't resize the image nor cropped it so there is nothing to compress.
Also, note that you paste it in the bmp-format and not in the jpg-format.
The compress feature doesn't change the file format of the picture.

If you want to send it in the jpg-format, then paste it to an image editor
first and resize it to its correct proportions and crop if necessary. Then
in Outlook choose Insert-> Picture...

 

[Paolo Marini]

Hi Roady,

I have finally found what the problem was. By default my messages where
going out as Rich Text rather than HTML.

In fact, even using the Insert Picture from file with a jpg image of about
138KB, the message in the draft folder was appearing as 4MB big, no matter
how I tried to compress the image.

As soon as I switched the message format to HTML, the problem went away.

By the way, the Compress picture functionallity seems to work even when you
paste bitmap files.

Thanks anyway for your help.

Regards,
Paolo

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Good to hear you've found your solution and thanks for sharing.

By the way, the Compress picture functionallity seems to work even when
you
paste bitmap files.

I know, I never stated otherwise. Bmp is an uncompressed file format so
larger by definition than compressed file formats like jpg and png. I
recommended using those file formats instead as they are already much
smaller than then bmp-file to begin with.



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