Outlook image preview
This is something I wrote a long time ago to enable previews of photo attachments in Outlook. I don’t use it any more (gmail has made Outlook redundant for me) but it was linked to by the Guardian and was the most visited page on my old website so I’m including it here in case anyone still finds it useful.
Outlook Image Preview
Most of the credit for this should go to P Lee for his original macro, which I have slightly tweaked here.
The image preview is a solution to a problem thrown up by Outlook, which makes it awkward to view attached images. Whereas Outlook Express automatically previews attached images in the message window, Outlook forces the user to open each image individually, or to go through the relatively laborious process of saving the images and then viewing them.
This macro solves that problem by launching a browser window (with one click on a toolbar button) showing all the attached images in an email. If more than one email is selected in Outlook it will show all attached images in all selected emails, with links back to the original emails.
Eric Legault has come up with an alternative solution here, (updated here and again here), but I prefer this one.
It initially scales large images to the width of the browser popup, but you can click on the image to toggle between full size and browser width. Hover over the image to see the original size/scaled size. Resize the browser window, right-click on the background, and choose ‘Refresh’ to resize all the images at once.
To install, right click here and choose ‘save target as…” (or ‘save link as’) and save the file somewhere memorable, like your desktop.
In Outlook, click on Tools/Macro/Visual Basic Editor:
In the Visual Basic window which will open, click on File/Import File…:
Find the file you saved (you’ll need to change the ‘Files of type’ to ‘All Files’, see below) and open it.
You can now close the visual basic editor and the macro should be installed. You can run it selecting an email and going to Tools/Macro/Macros, highlighting ‘view_attachments’ and clicking ‘Run’.
To make life easier though, add a button to your toolbar. Go to Tools/Customize, select ‘Macros’ on the left-hand side and drag ‘view_attachments’ from the ‘Commands’ window on the right onto a toolbar. Once it’s on a toolbar you can right-click it and change the button image, remove the text, etc.
It may be necessary to tweak security settings (in Tools/Macro/Security) in order to get the macro to run. Avoid moving your security level to ‘Low’ though.
Julius Honnor is a writer, photographer and web person who lives in London and travels a lot. He has written several guidebooks for Footprint, Fodor's, Rough Guides and others, as well as for newspapers and magazines.
Great macro, thank you.
Excellent… I’ve been looking for a solution for long time, finally I had luck and Google guided me to this page. Thanks a lot for this super macro.
No problem – I’m pleased you like it. And that it still works!
This doesn’t fully work for me. I’m running Outlook 2007 on Windows 7 64-bit. The browser pop-up appears, contains the appropriate text heading and has a black background. If the attachments are JPG or PNG, then they appear. I haven’t tried GIF yet. If the attachment is TIF, then it does not appear, but the broken image icon appears instead. Regardless of attachment type, the hyperlink named with the the email subject does not work.
I suspect that something in the registry differs for Win 7 64-bit.
Hi Julius,
thank you very much for the macro. It worked fine!
But….I came to delete it (thought it was causing outlook to preview my emails too and it was annoying) and when I realise it was not the macro I tried to turn it back on but it keeps saying the macro is disabled.
sorry to bother you with this, but any idea of what I can do?
Thanks in advance
Andrea
Hi Andrea, I’m not sure why this should be. How did you delete the macro? And did you change your security settings? Julius.
I suspect that it won’t work for Tiff files on any OS, as it uses IE to preview the images, and I don’t think IE can open Tiff files. You could be right about the registry affecting the hyperlink. I don’t use Outlook any more, but perhaps someone else can help on this? All the best, Julius.
Thank you, Julius! It works fine for me.
Only a minor, strange and unimportant question: every time I use the macro, then the font size of my folder names at the left panel is reduced (no, is not a joke). Any idea about why this can happen? (Outlook 2003 on Win XP + SP2).
By the way, is there any way to manually replace IE by Google Chrome in the macro?
Simply Fantastic !!!!!
So much time wasted with MO….why didn’t I come here before !?
uhaeuehua
Tks a lot !