iPhone: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Photos by Email—and by Text Message

You can send any photo—one you've taken with the iPhone, or one you've transferred from your computer—by email, which comes in handy more often than you might think. It's useful when you're out shopping and want to seek your spouse's opinion on something you're about to buy. It's great when you want to give your buddies a glimpse of whatever hell or heaven you're experiencing at the moment.

Once you're in the Photos program, tap the button, and then tap Email Photo. Now you can email it to someone, right from the phone. The iPhone automatically scales, rotates, and attaches the photo to a new outgoing message. All you have to do is address it and hit Send.

(The fine print: You can attach only one photo per email. Photo resolution is reduced to 640 × 480 pixels. Void where prohibited.)

Sending Photos to Cellphones

Now, if you had an ordinary cellphone, you'd be able to do something that's quick and useful—send a photo as a text message. It winds up on the screen of the other guy's cellphone.

That's a delicious feature, almost handier than sending a photo by email. After all, your friends and relatives don't sit in front of their computers all day and all night (unless they're serious geeks).

Alas, the iPhone is one of the very few phones that can't send or receive MMS messages (multimedia messaging service), the technology required for this trick. Officially ...