Goodbye Outlook - Gmail now lets you paste images directly from clipboard | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye Outlook - Gmail now lets you paste images directly from clipboard

beerpla.net

65 pointsarchon81038 comments

Half a year ago, I would've pumped my fist and screamed "Hell yes". That was the biggest feature I've missed in Outlook.

However, Gmail has been so excruciatingly slow that a month ago, I've switched back to Outlook (Outlook for Mac 2011), and haven't looked back since. It feels really good to use an email client again that responds to what I do instantenously. Web email clients still have a way to go.

This is interesting. Are you using Firefox by any chance? I was incredibly frustrated with Gmail speed on Firefox for a couple of years, but after switching to Chrome haven't seen a problem on any of my boxes.

I had the same experience, but with Safari instead of Firefox. Really wonder why this is happening.

More specifically, if you have Firebug, then it slows down Gmail considerably.

But gmail detects it, and tells you about it - at least it did for me.

Are you from China by chance?

Why the downvote? It's a known fact that the government there is purposely slowing down access to Google properties.

I'm using Google Apps and haven't noticed any slow down. Still happy as Larry.

Native e-mail clients still have the advantage of working with any e-mail server, including those that don't serve ads based on analyzing my e-mails.

The whole local e-mail folder can be backed up to your favourite online backup if you feel that it's not safe to keep just a local copy.

Here's the one thing about Gmail that drives me nuts: It doesn't let you preview its line wrapping. This is terrible when you're including bits of code in an email. How hard could it be? You could even pull it off half-decently with Greasemonkey.

Ability to drag images is not what's keeping people on Outlook.

Can someone here confirm this is actually working for them? (Paste an image from the clipboard, send the email, check that the inline image was actually attached)

It appears to me that FF4 is merely displaying the clipboard image in the rteditor in draft mode, but it is not actually attached to the email when sent.

I didn't for me. Looking in my sent box the message had an inline stream rather than an attachment:

<img src="data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD/7QAcUGhvdG9zaG9wIDMuMAA4QklNBAQAAAAAAAD/2wBDAAMCAgICAgMCAgIDAwMDBAcEBAQEBAgGBgUHCgkKCg...

Works fine here on both chrome 12 and ff4 on ubuntu.

Can you verify it actually works on the recipient side? I actually just tried send it out and found that the email actually ate up the image and it was not showing up.

I may have jumped the gun here...

Same here. Looking at the email source the MIME looks like it should work, but for some reason clients aren't interpreting it as HTML.

  Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=000e0cd3282edb3e4e04a04d2812
  
  --000e0cd3282edb3e4e04a04d2812
  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
  
  
  
  --000e0cd3282edb3e4e04a04d2812
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
  
  <img src=3D"data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAABJ8AAAQaCAIAAABik=
  k5NAAAgAElEQVR4nOzdd1QbZ77wcZK9e7O7d7PZTbmbZN+N49gG9xLHveACmOYKGIONe6V3MO42=

I just posted an update with some findings - basically, those "3D" and =\r\n characters that something is adding (somewhere in Gmail) are messing everything up. We're this close to a working version of this...

Oh yea, I didn't notice that 3D. It's weird because ascii 3D is just an = sign.

=3D indicates quoted-printable encoding for 7-bit transports.

That is actually a correct way of creating an image inline and should work, but Gmail or something in Firefox is adding extra characters into the mix and messing everything up. See the update in the article.

Are you sure this is a Gmail feature and not a Firefox feature? I have been able to paste images into RTEs (rich text editors) since Firefox 3. If the image comes from the clipboard, Firefox will add the image data inline. It works in all RTEs I use - e.g. http://ckeditor.com/demo , http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/editor/examples/default...

Since the src of the image is inline, you can save/send it as part of the HTML output of the editor - no attachments or separate upload is needed.

I can't test this now, but I remember trying it many times in Firefox, and every time I'd get a little icon that showed a little broken image. It was only after the Firefox 4 upgrade, that it started working (well in gmail's case, kind of working).

Having looked into what gets sent, it is definitely a Firefox thing, but for me, it only started doing it with 4.0, so hence this post.

This is a browser feature. It wraps images with <img> tags just like it wraps email addresses in a <a href"mailto:"> link when copied. The text editor just renders this HTML.

Here's some interesting observations, this will work on any document that is in designMode or any element that has contenteditable attribute.

Firefox doesn't have the clipboardData interface like IE, Chrome and Safari have so it must be built into Firefox. From a quick look it seems like it doesn't expose the stream data to JavaScript which is unfortunate, I would love for this to be available.

Finally! Now my screenshot workflow is down to two steps:

Win+S (OneNote screenshot feature) CTRL+V

That is exactly what mine is too. I believe this makes us roughly 100 times more productive compared to those who need to cut an area from a screenshot and use something like Print Screen + PhotoShop.

I use Cropper (http://cropper.codeplex.com/). Works great, and both Notes and Outlook take the Ctrl+V just fine. Cropper can also be used to intercept PtrnScrn commands.

Snipping tool (Vista/7) has similar functionality, I keep it pinned to start menu, though more often than now I use Alt + PrintScrn to just copy the active window to clipboard.

You can drag and drop them too. Just found that out the other day.

This is a big step forward for Gmail. Now if they could just add some simple mail merge functionality, that would be another super-useful feature.

I tried to drag a file onto a gmail message the other day. It didn't work. Now that would get rid of Outlook for a lot of people.

This actually works for me.

This feature's been available on modern browsers for nearly a year now..

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/drag-and-drop-attachme...

Yeah, that works fine, you just have to drag it into the area that gets highlighted for dropping.

This has been a Gmail Labs for a long while... I have it enabled for all 3 of my gmail accounts for a while now.

Has it? I've specifically checked for it on a number of occasions. I've seen the ability to drag and drop images there, but not paste a screenshot from clipboard.

There is no labs project like that. You're correct - I've been also checking for ages.

Is not working for me. I also use Google for my domain, if that matters.

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