Gmail finally lets you insert image in messages

Gmail may be used by millions of people every day. But as we're constantly reminded, the service is still in beta and lags behind other webmail services in some rather baffling areas. Case in point, up until yesterday there was no simple way to embed an inline image in a Gmail message. Today you can, by enabling the "Inserting images" feature in Gmail Labs.

In order to insert an image you'll have to have "rich formatting" turned on. Once it is, you should notice an image icon squeezed between the emoticon and link icons. Click it and you can upload an image to post in the body of your message. That's it.

Now can somebody explain to me why this is in the experimental "labs" section instead of being a standard update to the Gmail interface? Maybe it needs more testing, but really, Gmail has been around for 5 years. You'd think Google would have been able to work out the kinks in this feature by now.

Tags: email, gmail, images