Images In Gmail Are Worth A Thousand Words
The "Inserting images" feature comes about a month after Gmail added the functionality to preview YouTube, Picasa, Flickr and Yelp content in the body of an e-mail.
Writing on the Official Gmail Blog, Kent Tamura, software engineer for Google, acknowledges that inserting images into e-mail messages is probably long overdue.
"Well, it's about time. You no longer have to use workarounds to put images into your messages or attach images when you really want to inline them," wrote Tamura.
To turn on the functionality, users need to click on the Labs icon in Gmail and scroll most of the way down the features page to find the "inserting images" option and then click enable. Once the function is enabled, an image icon will appear in the e-mail toolbar, alongside the other formatting options.
By clicking on the photo icon, Gmail provides two options for image upload, either by choosing an image hosted locally on the machine or by inserting a URL.
For the image functionality to work properly, users must be sending e-mails in rich formatting mode or the picture won't appear. It is also important to note that standard Gmail setting don't allow images to appear in messages in an attempt to protect users from spam. That just means that to see a picture that was sent, users will still have to click the "display images" or "always display images from" options to make it appear.