Lotus Notes Mails - Optimizing Screenshots

If you send a lot of screen shots through your Lotus Notes email, then this tip should work well for you.

First thing first: it is always more effective to use the the File->Import option or the Create->Picture option from the menu to insert an image into an email instead of just pasting in a screen shot. This is chiefly because the Windows clipboard stores the copied image in an intermediary format that Lotus Notes does not like much, and the translation is often disastrous. For GIFs and JPEGs, the Import or Create options work like a charm. The downside, of course, is that you have to take the pain of actually saving your screen shot to disk.

When you are pasting screen shots in directly, they sometimes grab more space than what seems appropriate. This can be remedied by adding a simple parameter to your notes.ini file (which is setup when Lotus Notes is installed, and houses user preferences, admin information etc). The name of this parameter is OptimizeImagePasteSize, and the entry that needs to be to the notes.ini file is OptimizeImagePasteSize=1 .

To edit the Notes INI file, you have to shutdown Lotus Notes. The INI file would be in the Lotus Notes data directory, which usually is the C:\Lotus\Notes folder. The notes.ini file can be edited in Notepad. A very strong note of caution: please do not mess around with the other parameters in the INI file; you do so at your own peril, and at the risk of incurring the wrath of site support!

The parameter itself works by reducing the size of the images that are pasted in. To be specific, it converts the image to 256-color, and also compresses it into a GIF format. Its not exactly a high-quality image, but it is fairly decent. Whenever you want high-quality, you can always import it in, as described earlier.

Once this parameter is included in the INI file, you will definitely notice faster emails when you send screen shots the next time.