Prefer photos compressed in zip file rather than imbedded in email

Question

My daughter sends me pictures of our granddaughter using her Powerbook, iPhoto, and Apple Mail app. I use AOL for my regular mail. Mail seems to automatically imbed the pictures in the body of the email. If she sends a large number of pictures, even properly resized for email, it takes forever for these files to open in the body of the email. I received an email with 16 pictures and it took nearly ten minutes to open, and AOL kept warning me it was overloaded. Is there any way to use Apple Mail and have the pictures zipped?
ds

Answer 1

As I mention in a post to HTML question in this forum, I believe the only thing that distinguishes "embedded" from "attached" images is some tags in the message -- it really doesn't make much sense to talk about them as separate files until something processes them into such after receiving what is really a single transmitted message.
IOW, Mail (& every other MIME-compliant sender app) always sends the pictures in the email itself, so it is a question of which tags it uses with them & how processes use them that determines what you see at the receiving end. Ideally, the only processing occurs at the receiving end, but in reality the servers may apply processes before final transmission to the addressee. For example, many free email services insert promotional ad blurbs into the body of the message. A few, particularly AOL, can strip the non-text content off the message as a parental control feature or at the request of client software & deliver (or not deliver) it as individual files, sometimes substantially altering the content or encoding as yet another "feature" of the service.
Long time AOL users may have noticed such things in the pre-OS X days -- if you sent multiple attachments via the old AOL client, it would automatically convert them to a .sit file for uploading & (in theory at least) AOL would automatically serve them as .sit files to Mac clients & .zip files to PC clients. (What David S. sees now with the OS X AOL client is the equivalent of that, less the conversion between .zip & .sit.) Using the AOL client also used to -- & maybe still does -- change some file associations so that the "owner app" (the default app that opens the file) is the AOL client.
If you have the Mac AOL client installed, you may notice that it is on the list of "open with" apps for many, many file types. Ironically, it is happy to open & play System 7 sound files & will become the default for opening them since OS X doesn't by default provide any app that registers with launch services to do this. Similar things happen with other file types, particularly those that are common with PC's but less so with Macs, or are basically proprietary versions of compression formats licensed by the once-mighty AOL & still floating around the web because their use is as free as all those AOL client disks it was once impossible to avoid. (For example, if you occasionally want to compress files into .sit format & don't feel like paying for Stuffit, you can do so with the AOL client.)
Anyway, the point is once you involve the AOL client in the equation, you can no longer be sure what you send is what a recipient will receive, over & above whatever the client email app does to process the message, or anything else that occurs after a message is sent.
In my experience, the best approach for images or anything else you want to arrive unaltered is to first "encapsulate" every file into a single zip file with the Finder (actually BOMArchiveHelper, if you want to be technical about it), & then attach that to your email. This pretty much keeps services from mucking with it in any way: even if they split it out from the text of the message, they treat it as one, non-graphic file that can't be displayed inline, no matter what the tags or anything else say they can do with it.