Gmail's Save to Photos button lets you save images in a message with a single click
Google is adding a new feature to Gmail that allows users to save images to Google Photos in a more convenient manner. Up until now, there were just two ways to save images. You could download the pictures and upload them to Photos or any other service.
The other way, which has been the easier one, is to use the Add to Drive button, which saves the image to your cloud storage. The new Save to Photos button kind of works similarly, and sends the media to Google Photos in a single click, thus reducing the manual effort. The option may seem to be trivial at first glance, but when you think about it, it could be a real timesaver when you have to save multiple images.
The Save to Photos button is not live for me or my friends in the US. According to Google's blog post the feature is being rolled out to users gradually, and will take up to 15 days (from May 26th) to be made available for all users. The option will also appear for all users including free, Workspace and G Suite accounts.
Here's how images appear in Gmail prior to the addition of the Photos button, there's the download and the add to drive buttons.
The announcement article has a couple of screenshots that shows us how the new option can be used. Pictures received as attachments in Gmail will have the Save to Photos button appear, when you mouse over the image's thumbnail. The new button appears right next to the Drive symbol, and has the Photos logo with the + symbol on it. Click on it and Gmail will save a copy of the picture to your Photos gallery. That's handy, isn't it? You may access the saved images across platforms and devices. The save option can also be accessed from the info panel that pops up when you click the three-dot button, from Gmail's image preview screen.
The screenshot from Google also confirms that the add to drive option will continue to exist, despite the introduction of saving the media to Photos. Some people may prefer to save the images to Drive for work purposes, while others may find Photos the better option for personal pictures, so it's nice to see that we get a choice between the two services.
The Save to Photos feature has one restriction, it will only support images that are in the JPEG format. As you may know, the JPEG/JPG container being a lossy format, uses significantly less amount of storage space than PNG and other higher quality containers. That may explain why Google has limited it to the space-saving one, at least for now.
The Save to Photos option seems like a no-brainer, it should have already been there, well it's better late than never I suppose. Google doesn't mention whether the Gmail mobile app for Android and iOS will be getting the new feature, but we expect it will be added like the Add to Drive option was.
You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!