Pasting screenshots into GMail

The official GMail Blog reported last week that Pasting images into messages just got easier, with a caveat though—it is presently available only on Google's own Chrome. The very short blog post emphasized on the most important use of this feature—the ability to paste screenshots into the mail body without having to save them locally.

I don't mind the condition, I anyway (love and) use Chome. But I was highly disappointed with their paste-screenshot-without-saving gimmick. I took a screenshot using Command-Control-Shift-4 on a Mac, or a more comfortable PrntScrn on Windows and clicked Ctrl-V inside the compose box. A cute little spinner made me wait for 17 seconds (Yes, I timed it!), and then I saw my screenshot. The poor thing looked like it was sentenced stoning till death, and at the last moment, when almost all blood was drained off, a compassionate soul showed mercy and stopped the sentence. Then someone took a picture of the skeletal remains with the camera set in high exposure compensation, and pasted it into the Gmail compose window. Here's how it looked:

Click this image to view a full size version and look at how derived my taskbar looks.

I download the image by right-clicking from inside the email and saving-as png. I open it up in the Windows Picture Viewer. I see the same whatever-was-left. I use Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome—the same perished remains. I view the email in an Outlook account, still pale and bloodless.

I use MS Paint to open the image. It looks fine. ACD See, works again. GIMP, yes. Picasa, oops! At least some consistency in Google products. None of GMail, Chrome, and Picasa could display the image properly.

This is the actual image (well, ok, this is a scaled-down version, click it to view the actual one):

So the screenshot is captured alright. The PNG contains the complete information about the image, but the a certain type of renderer cannot display it correctly. This was a straight forward scenario Google perhaps forgot to test before advertising the feature all over the internet.

And I was inconsequentially excited. I will have to go back to the old method of saving the screenshot before emailing it.