How to insert inline images in Gmail

One thing I really miss when I’m using Gmail compared to Apple’s Mail.app or Outlook is the ability to include inline images. Whenever I’m trying to explain almost anything I rely on pictures, and if you can’t insert them in the flow of the text they lose their context. It’s tough telling a story if you can’t illustrate it.

– First upload the image to a website, using ImageShack if you don’t have your own– Open up that image in a new browser window– Do a ‘Select All’ in Firefox to copy the HTML for that image– Paste the HTML into the email composition box within Gmail

– Set the Content-Disposition header of the image attachment to ‘inline’– Set the Content-ID header to a unique identifier (the cid)– In the HTML body of the message, reference it as <img src="cid:<that identifier>"/>

Gmail even displays messages created like this correctly, so there’s obviously the internal know-how within Google to implement it. The lack of this widely-requested feature several years after launch is a real shame, and part of the reason I’ve become worried about Gmail’s lack of progress. Here’s hoping they’re busy behind the scenes!