Back in the early-man days, the only way to add an email attachment on your iPhone and iPad was to dive deep into the depths of forever, find the one piece of information you wish to attach, use the share sheet, type in the recipient’s address, subject line, mail body and hit send. Phew! Lemme catch my breath! But what if you had to attach one more meme? Coz one is never enough! Imagine going through the same, tedious process of finding that one meme in the sea of cat videos and what not! Let’s just say, those were tough times! *shudders*
Fortunately, things are much easier now. Sending an email attachment on your iPhone won’t take ages, and there are a variety of options you can use. So let’s check them out.
First Up – Sending iOS Attachments The Early-Man Way
Yup, the old way still works. Despite its annoying beginnings, the good old iOS share sheet is still in play. And TBH, a share sheet is a pretty cool (and easy) way to add an email attachment on your iPhone and iPad. Don’t believe us? Let’s see. You are wandering around in the Files app, eyeing an impressive spreadsheet. Now, all you gotta do to mail that spreadsheet is to tap the share arrow, pick Mail from the list and follow the steps. Yeah yeah, I see what I did there!
Anyway, remember how I went on a rant earlier about how difficult it was to add another attachment to your Mail? Well, now it’s not and here’s why!
The Long Tap Method – iPhone/iPad
Once you are done writing your email, tap anywhere in the body of the email, and you’ll be met with the familiar little black pop up bubble.
Swipe left on the bubble, and you’ll be given options to ‘Add Attachment’, and Insert Photo or Video. Pick ‘Add Attachment’, and it will open a Files browser. And that’s your cue. Go crazy, pick anything you want from your iCloud Drive, Dropbox and once the file is attached, send away.
Just in case you were wondering, tapping ‘Insert Photo or Video’ will open the floodgates to your Photos browser.
Well, the only thing worth cribbing over is that in both cases, you can only add one file/photo/video at a time.
The Drag and Drop Method – iPad
Dragging and dropping are my two favourite things, and this method has both! Whenever you have an email open on your iPad, you can drag files into it, from pretty much anywhere. But before you get all excited, there are ways to do it.
- Open the app that holds the file you want.
- Then, press and hold and start dragging the file.
- Now, while dragging the file, switch to the Mail app, and drop the file into the body of the email. And done!
The good thing is that you can select multiple files and drag and drop them together. Pretty cool huh?
But, what if you aren’t satisfied with just one email attachment on an iPhone and iPad and want to send more from different sources at once? We are humans, and we love to spice things up! A picture from here, a video from there, a file from a distant land…
Here’s a neat little trick that’ll get you out of this pickle!
Open up one of the apps you want to add attachments from, and then open the Mail app in slide over view. For those who are ignorant AF, slide over view is the mode that allows you to slide an application out of the left side of the display so that it floats over the current full-screen app(s). This way, the Mail app stays put in a floating window, and you can switch to your other apps and drag and drop files into Mail as you go.
As you can see, attaching files and documents to an email on iOS is not as straightforward or even obvious as one would hope. In fact, the process might be a little overwhelming. But we hope these nifty tricks and tips will help make things easier for you. And if you have any cool tricks of your own, then let us know in the comments below!
