Why Can’t I Paste images?

A reader is having an issue pasting images:

“On a message board that I follow, was a photo that I wanted to send to a friend. I copied image , went to email, hit paste and the photo appeared. Sent it but the image did not ‘attach’ itself to the email. Seems this is happening on a regular basis lately. Have any ideas?”

You don’t see any attachments when you copy an image displaying in a forum or online because you aren’t actually inserting an image into your email. What you see when you view an image online is a display that results from HTML coding that tells the page, forum, or email to show an image that’s stored on a server somewhere. When you copy that image, you’re really just copying the HTML code to your email with the instructions to display.   You may find that the image won’t display for some email programs because they block the display of external images.  Even if the image does display, if someone were to delete from its original location online, it would disappear from your email.

To actually save a copy of an image, you’ll want to right-click on it and choose the save option if it’s available. Not all online images have this option.

Then you can attach the image or insert into your email. Another alternative is to take a screenshot, paste it into a program like Paint, trim it down to the size you want, and save.