Large Pictures clipped in Outlook 2007 - Maximum size for images?

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Hi everyone, quick vacation blog concerning images (JPG, BMP, etc...) rendering improperly, and specifically clipping of said images, in Outlook 2007. When viewed with the legacy clients, the images render properly. When viewing the images with Outlook Web Access, the images also render perfectly.

As you probably know, the reason for the difference in behavior with Outlook 2007 is that the legacy clients used a limited subset of IE's functionality as the rendering engine for emails and images within those mails. As you also likely know, we have changed the rendering engine to Word 2007 with Office 2007 (“by design” as you may have heard a time or two on other questions). This decision was made for a number of reasons from what I can gather:

  • Plethora of browser versions and developers
  • Different HTML standard adherence among those browsers
  • Different HTML Composition Tools (Notepad rules!)
  • Probably others I have neither heard of nor imagined...

By choosing Word as the rendering engine, the Outlook team has made the decision to bypass all the browser and HTML tools issues that they cannot possibly track or control. In so doing, now HTML developers will need to be able to convert from their tool of choice to Word to insure optimal rendering. This is not a problem, and in fact is documented well here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx.

The HTML validation tool for Word 2007 is downloadable here: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=0B764C08-0F86-431E-8BD5-EF0E9CE26A3A&displaylang=en.

But the point of this blog isn't to rehash the developer work that has already been done on conversion to Word so that it renders well in Outlook 2007; rather, the point is simply to document a technical point that I can't seem to find publicly documented anywhere.

What is the maximum size for images that will render without clipping in Outlook 2007? The answer to the question is 18 inches in height. And that size is the size as shown in Word 2007, not as shown in any other program. I haven’t tested width maximums yet, but feel free to share if you have J.

Quote for this blog:

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.

Abraham Lincoln