Dear Lifehacker, I recently made the switch from an iPhone 4 to HTC One. Something has been bothering me: I can’t copy and paste images from the web or the phone image gallery into the body of a text message or email. It’s the easiest thing to do on an iPhone. But so far has been totally impossible on my HTC One. Why?
It doesn’t seem to be an Android issue; my friends with Samsung devices laugh as they copy and paste images in message they send to me, while I’m unable to reply with an image in the body text, visually silenced by my phones handicap of only being able to send as an attachment. Damn, I can’t sext! Is there a way to get around the problem. Thanks, Sextless
Phone user picture from Shutterstock
Dear Sextless,
According to HTC’s website, you can share images via email by going to Gallery app, choosing the image or album you want to send, choosing Share and following the onscreen instructions.
Being able to see images in an email message is a function of the client application. You can try alternative email clients for Android or webmail and see if you get a different outcome.
Typically, display of images is limited as a security precaution. Images can be used as vectors for injecting malware on some devices so not opening them for display automatically is a way for limiting the attack surface of your device.
Sending your photos and videos [HTC Support]
Cheers
Lifehacker
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Comments
One response to “Ask LH: Why Don’t Images Show Properly On My Phone?”
There is a little paperclip icon to the right of the text box when you are sending a text message – by tapping on that you can attach anything from your gallery.
If you want to save images from the web to your gallery, long press on any image and tap save image from the menu. This will download it and it will be in the gallery. You can have the gallery only show your download folder for example.
If you install a 3rd party file explorer app like ES File Explorer (totally free, open source) or Astro File Manager (free & pro available, commercial product) you can also use these to find the image, long press on it and share it with the messaging app. Going that way will make it appear as a new text message but if you type in the name/phone no of a contact and send it to them, the new pic message will automatically be added to the conversation of that contact.
These might sound complex at first but once you do it a few times it’s dead easy and just as fast as copy/paste.