Apple Mail image attachment is bad UX

// August 11th, 2009 // Products, software

Apple Mail image attachment is bad UX

Two things I don’t love about Apple Mail:

  1. It embeds images in the content of the email instead of making it an attachment, leading to calls from Outlook-using friends who don’t know how to get the image out of the email so they can use it. It would be great as an option, but I’d like to be able to choose ‘attachment’ instead of ‘embed’ as the default.
  2. Worse is the location and relevant prominence of the little drop-down menu that resizes the images you add to your emails.

Friends, relatives and colleagues have used Apple Mail for years and never noticed this tiny, critical item, assuming they had no say in image resizing. I’ve just got off the phone with one friend who’s had four attempts at sending me a few 2Mb images, unable to figure out why they arrive in my inbox as 350Kb.

It only appears after you insert an image, which makes sense, but that makes it most unlikely to ever be spotted.

I’m no UX designer but I think this should appear either in the image attachment dialogue box itself or up in the toolbar area.

What do you think, am I wrong? Can you design a better solution?