Drag and drop image from Windows Explorer to Outlook email (2013) as inline image

Question

I would swear that was possible in earlier versions of Outlook:

Open New Email in Outlook
Ensure HTML Format
Drag .png file from Windows Explorer into the email

I wish the email is now part of the message but in fact the picture is an attachment.

Is it possible to drop images into an HTML message?

Does it only act this way with PNG's, or do JPG's act the same way? What bit-depth is the PNG (PNG24, or PNG32 kind of thing)? Do you have Word set as your editor in Outlook? — Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007, Mar 06 '13 at 19:48
You're only trying to drag'n'drop 1 image at a time correct? — Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007, Mar 06 '13 at 20:00
yes, 1 image, totally basic. and it strictly goes into the mail as attachment even when I drop it inside the text. — joh, Mar 06 '13 at 20:01
The only work around I can come up with is an add-on that you could drop the image onto and it inserts at cursor position. That's a little too time consuming for me to throw together though. — Still.Tony, May 09 '17 at 15:28

Steven · Answer 1 · 2017-05-10T20:53:30.330

3

Add "Copy as image" to the Explorer context menu. Paste in Outlook.

Part 1: nircmd

Use the utility nircmd to copy the file to the clipboard as an image. Then, paste the image into Outlook.

nircmd.exe clipboard copyimage <filename>

Part 2: Add to context-menu

For efficiency, consider adding this as a context (right-click) menu item.

Download and extract nircmd to C:\utils
Create the registry key: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Copy as image\command
Set the (default) value of the key to C:\utils\nircmdc.exe clipboard copyimage "%1"

This add "Copy as image" to the context menu for all files (not just images). If the file is not an image, the command does not copy anything.

For this solution to work only for specific file types, perform the steps above and replace the asterisk in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\ with the file type in a special key (example: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.png\).

edited May 10 '17 at 20:53

answered May 09 '17 at 16:06

Steven

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This is excellent but the context menu item doesn't show up when I put it under specific extensions. e.g. [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.jpg\shell\Copy as image\command] – Still.Tony May 10 '17 at 16:04
1

Oops! I had the path wrong. It should be `HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.png`. See edit. – Steven May 10 '17 at 20:54
I'd also suggest extracting to C:\windows (or someplace already on path) because C:\utils isn't standard and adds a "go edit your path environment variable" step. ..Although if one is venturing into fixes like this, it's best to have a separate folder for things added to path. – Still.Tony May 11 '17 at 12:01
You don't need it in your PATH variable if you specify the full path: `C:\...\whatever.exe` – Steven May 11 '17 at 13:02

Drag and drop image from Windows Explorer to Outlook email (2013) as inline image

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