How Do I Save Email Photos to My Computer?

Email is a great way to share pictures with the people you love. With the click of a mouse, a photograph can be sent halfway around the world. If you have a number of photos in your email inbox that you'd like to have on your computer's hard drive, don't worry, moving them to your computer is a simple task. All you need to do is save your attachments to disk.

If you manage your emails with Microsoft Outlook, your pictures are stored on your computer, but are inaccessible to you until saved to your desktop. To save pictures in Outlook to a folder on your computer, simply right-click the picture and click "Save As." A window will pop up asking you where you want to save the picture; pick a good place to save the picture and click "Okay" when ready. Your picture is now out of Outlook and onto a folder on your hard drive.

Mozilla Thunderbird is a desktop email program like Outlook, meaning your images are already on your computer, but not in a folder you can browse. Just as with Outlook, you can right-click a given photo and click "Save As" to save a given photo to a particular folder on your hard drive. Alternatively, you can drag the icon of the photo at the bottom of the email's window to the folder of your choice.

If you use an online email service, such as Gmail, saving your email photos to your hard drive is as easy as clicking the "Download" button at the bottom of your email. If you're using Gmail, you can even press the "Download All" button to receive all of your files at once, in the form of a ZIP file.

Other online email services may vary, but the "Download" button is included in Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo mail, as well as Gmail. If this isn't the case for you, you can always right-click any picture and click "Save As" to have your browser save a copy of a given image to your hard drive.