"Could you resend your photos as attachments, and don't embed them?"
Sound familiar Apple Mail users?
I thought I'd share the 5 second fix: – Rename the Extension - it's that simple…
"If they can see them, they've already got 'em."
I've taught most of my PC-using clients how to fix the embedded .BMP photo bug…
If you are the E-mailee with the PC and you're reading this, here's your 5 second fix: go to the e-mail with the embedded photo, drag the photo to the desktop or find the image in your downloads folder (or wherever your computer keeps e-mail attachments) and select the .bmp extension and replace it with .jpg (your computer my warn you about changing extensions but proceed anyway). Voila! You now have viewable, save-able jpegs…done.
If you're the E-Mailer ( using Apple Mac Mail ) then your options will take longer:
1. Teach your client the steps above over the phone since they already have the images.
2. Zip-compress the jpegs and re-send the photos since the the PC's system will leave .zip extensions alone (your E-Mailee will need to un-compress the zipped files to get jpegs).
3. Try to resend the jpegs attached to email messages with no text of any kind in the email and no signature or links at the bottom. It seems colored type, fonts or email addresses or website links in signatures will sometimes contribute to the .BMP file name bug.
4. Upload the jpg files to an online FTP service like YouSendit and send your client a link.
What Happened? Macs are from Mars and PC's are from Venus, so it's no surprise they don't speak the same language. Somewhere between the Mac and the PC through the magic of e-mail and Outlook, the extension of the attached .jpg files gets removed and replaced with .bmp. The weird thing is the photo still shows up on Outlook in the e-mail (as sort-of embedded) but the .bmp file is unrecognizable everywhere else on the PC and won't show up as an image. Until you manually rename it back to a jpg. I've had people send me my original emails back that they said were corrupted and the jpeg photos were there as normal attachments on my Mac or my iPhone.
Note: True corrupted photos will not show up in the body of an e-mail. If the person receiving the files can not see images and all they see is a dead-link symbol or a question mark where the photo should be, they are lost-in-transit or corrupted. Better start over.
Hope you like this old photo of me when 20" CRT screens were cool and 3.25" floppy discs came in colors…