Like an image in an Microsoft Outlook email? Here’s how to save it to a separate picture file.
Sometimes you get an email with a nice picture displayed in the message (as opposed to an attachment). You can ‘grab’ any image and save it to your computer.
On most web pages you can simply right-mouse click and choose a save picture option. That doesn’t work for most emails, even HTML formatted ones, because the image isn’t always a separate file.
Attached, Linked or Embedded
A picture in an email can come in three different ways, attached, linked or embedded.
Attached is when the image (or any file) is sent with the message. It appears in a line at the top of the message
Linked images appear in the body of the message but the image itself is stored on an Internet web site. Recent versions of Outlook block the download of the images unless you approve it, until then the place for the image has a red X icon.
Embedded images are sent as part of the email message (the message is therefore larger than one with linked images). On a technical level the picture is encoded and made part of the HTML code sent to you.
How to save any image in an email
Attached images are easy to save, right-click on the file name and choose ‘Save As’.
Linked and Embedded images can also be saved, but it’s not so obvious how to do that.
In modern Outlook, right-click on the image and choose ‘Save as Picture …’. This is the same feature as in Word since Office 2010 for saving images in documents.
Save as Picture saves the image to a separate file.
In older Outlooks, if you don’t see ‘Save as Picture. …’, right-click on the image and choose ‘Copy’
Then paste into an image editor like Paint, Photoshop or whatever you prefer. All Windows users have Paint on their machine (under Programs | Accessories). Open up the image editor to a blank image then paste.
You may need to resize the image size to fit what you have pasted in.
Then simply save the image to whatever format and location you want.
Alternatives
If that doesn’t suit you, there are alternatives which might work.
- Save As the message to web page, open the page in a browser
- Use the View in Browser option to open a HTML message. Open the message (not in the Reading/Preview pane) then Home | Move | View in Browser
Either method will leave you with the message open in a browser window and from there you may be able to copy images.
