Gmail has a rather complicated way of inserting a photo into email signatures. Perhaps Gmail does not want a lot of data saved within their servers because they request that users store photos on a photo hosting website (which uses a different server), making the process of adding a photo to the signature cumbersome.

What I've observed is that although the majority of Tech Helpline users do have small JPEG files for profile pictures, some don't. I have even seen some Gmail users have very high resolution pictures in their email signatures, using over 10MB. Take that storage and multiply it by all the hundreds of thousands of people who use Gmail, and well, the storage levels add up quite a bit.

However, we have found a work-around to host your image on a server without the hassle of actually finding a host server. Simply put: make Google host it for you by following a few steps. We found the following information at this website and after testing it a few times, we find that it works.

Here is what user FC posted on the website:

Issue

How to add a picture file stored on my PC to my Gmail signature, without using any third-party service or application.

Solution

You can't directly upload a picture and use it as signature. Gmail only accepts the URL for the image file (the picture must be stored online). So if you don't want to upload the file to a third party service, this tip is for you.

1. Select a photo/picture from your PC and send it to your mailbox (send yourself an email).

• Create a new email
• Drag and drop the image file in the message body field.
• In CC, enter your email address and click Sent.

2. Open the received email > right-click on the image file and select "Copy image URL"

3. Click on "Settings" (small gear icon at the top right of your mailbox).

4. Click on "Settings"

5. Scroll down to the Signature section.

6. Click on "Insert Image"

7. Paste the URL of your image in appropriate field.

8. You shall have a preview of you picture, you can edit it (crop, resize, etc.) before saving it.

As far as we know, these steps are not against Google policy because when emailing the photo to yourself, your photo file gets compressed, so it does not take as much space in the Google server.

We thank Kioskea and user 'FC' for sharing this information with the world.

To view the original article, visit the Tech Helpline blog.