Outlook Add-On To Mass Extract Photos From Email And Save To Your Destop

In the days before social media, photos were often shared by attaching them to an email message.  If you've been on the internet for a decade or longer, you probably have Outlook email messages with .jpg, .gif or .tif formatted photographs. If you find yourself with a large quantity of Outlook email messages, MessageExport can bulk extract those photographs to a folder where you can organize them better.

MessageExport is a useful add-on for exporting Outlook emails to different places and formats. Download a free trial for Outlook 2013, 2010, 2007, or 2003, and follow along with this step by step guide.

Depending on how many of your emails that you expect to contain photos, you may want to proceed one of two ways:

The first way would be to simply bulk extract all of the email messages in your inbox to a folder on your disk.

The second approach would be to spend a little time to sort through your emails, using Outlook's search function to find emails from friends and family that may have photographs attached, and then move those emails into a separate folder for processing by MessageExport. It doesn't matter that there may be hundreds of these emails, and it also doesn't matter if some of them do not have photos. By collecting them into a special location, you're starting the process of organizing the photos.

Note that MessageExport will not actually remove the file attachments from your emails, so don't worry about forever separating the files from the messages. Rather, it will copy the files from the email and save them to a folder on your computer that you designate.

Exporting Pictures from Outlook Emails

First, go to the Outlook folder containing the emails that have the pictures you want to save to a disk. Click on the folder, then select all emails in the folder by typing "Ctrol-A".

From the MessageExport toolbar, choose "Export Attachments Only."  Then click the "Export" button to start the export process.

MessageExport Toolbar

Export Button

MessageExport will ask you to select a folder where it will copy the file attachments. In our example we will save all files to a folder called "pictures" on our desktop.

Select the target folder.

When the folder is selected, the export process will continue.

When MessageExport has completed the operation, you can go to your folder to view the output.  Notice that MessageExport has created a sub-folder for each email, and has placed the files inside these folders.

If you wanted MessageExport to put the files into a single folder, and not create sub-folders, it's easy to change the "Export Attachments" profile to do this.    Here's to make this change.

First, select the "Export Attachments Only,"  profile from the MessageExport toolbar, and then select the Edit button from the toolbar.

MessageExport Toolbar Edit Button

This will bring up the Common Settings page.  Under "Export Attachments," choose:
 "As file attachments in same folder."

MessageExport's common settings tab.

This setting will place all file attachments into a single folder. Click OK to save your change.  Now all files will be saved to the same folder.  Any attachments having the same name will be appended with a sequential number so they will not overwrite another file.

When you complete an export operation, now files will be saved to the same folder.  You can click on Window's Type column to sort the files by file type. For example, all PNG images will be grouped together.

Windows folder with PNG files

The same export and editing process will work for other types of email conversions. For example, to save emails with attachments to PDF format, just select the appropriate export profile from MessageExport's Outlook toolbar.

For more information and a free trial, visit the MessageExport Add-on home page.

Should you upgrade to Outlook 2013?

In July, 2012, Microsoft released a preview copy of MS Office 2013 which gave us our first peek at the latest version of the flagship office productivity suite.  The new MS Outlook is not a radical departure from the comfortable Outlook 2010 experience so many of us are familiar with, but it is an overall sleeker, cleaner, and more efficient version.  It also contains several new features worth taking a look at while deciding whether it’s worth the upgrade.

There are a few noticeable visual changes to the new Outlook.  The program now has a Metro twist to match the style of Windows 8, a style with a signature "flat graphics."  The Outlook email view window has been reduced from four panes to two.  One pane shows your inbox, and the other is for reading.  Replying to messages has been simplified as well.  Instead of opening up a new email to write your reply you simply start typing inline on the message within the reading pane. 

Another way Microsoft has streamlined the Outlook 2013 is its new Peek feature.  Peek lets you access information in contacts, calendar, or tasks without having to switch over to those modes.  When you hover the mouse over the mode buttons a window appears offering a preview of the information within.  This is similar to the capability built into the task bar of Windows 7, and it is great to see Microsoft implement a version of this system inside Office. 

Contacts, renamed People, have received a bit of an overhaul.  You could integrate your contacts from sources such as Facebook or Gmail just as with Outlook 2010, but in the past that usually resulted in a muddled contact list full of duplicates.  Outlook 2013 introduces People cards that make it easier to store all information about a single person on one card.  Email contacts are cross-referenced and consolidated with social media data and other information. 

Mail Tips introduces features to Outlook that have long been a part of other services such as Gmail.  For example, if you use the word “attachment” or “attach” in the body of your message but fail to attach any files Outlook will display a warning.  Policy Tips is certain to be a welcome new feature for IT admins.  Policy Tips allows administrators to set up warnings that will display automatically if, for example, a message may contain confidential company information or violate company policy. 

There are a few other small changes in the new version.  Weather information is now embedded in the calendar.  The search box now has a filter that allows users to choose which folders to include in their search.  Outlook 2013 also gives users the ability to minimize the ribbon bar to make the program easier to use with touchscreens.  

As with Office 2010, Office 2013 will support a 64-bit processors which can take advantage of the larger addressable memory offered by the 64-bit platform. A 32-bit version of Office 2013 will also be available, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft Outlook 2013 works much like Outlook 2010, and if you are satisfied with your current version it may make sense to hold off on the upgrade.  But if you are planning on using a tablet, concerned with information security, or simply want a quicker and more streamlined version of the Outlook you use now then you should seriously consider upgrading. 

The MessageExport add-in for Outlook has been upgraded to work with Outlook 2013, both 32 and 64 bit versions (64bit is highly preferred because of the large amounts of data that MessageExport often is called upon to process). MessageExport lets you save your Outlook email content in different formats and to different places. If you decide to make the switch and upgrade to Outlook 2013, you can bring MessageExport along with you.

Conversion software reviews for Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is a terrific email client, and hundreds of millions of us live and work in Outlook each day.  Outlook tells the story of our work and personal lives.  Our Outlook calendars tell us where to go, synch with our mobiles, and embody the story of where we've been and where we're going.

Our Outlook emails hold the ongoing stories of our friendships and our work lives, our hopes, dreams, accomplishments and frustrations.

Our Outlook contacts are our lifeblood to our social lives, allowing us to connect with whose important and meaningful.

Yet for all of the information that flows into Outlook, it's not always very easy to get information out of Outlook.  That's peculiar, since it's not called INlook -- it's OUTlook. We should be able to get stuff out of Outlook when its convenient to do so.

This blog will examine software and methods that will help us extract our important content from Outlook, and show us how we might convert it to whatever format we require.   Join  us regularly as we start up this new blog!  Please feel free to suggest software and tips in the comments.