Copying Images Out of Outlook

I was reminded today of a real annoyance of mine when I’m trying to work with Outlook. Somewhat frequently in my week I receive an e-mail with a graphic or image in it that I need to do some editing. It’s not really any serious editing that needs to be done, just a notation or illustration to help a client or something.

Here’s where the challenge presents itself.

The images are usually embedded in the HTML message and aren’t seen as an attachment. If if right-click on the image I get a nice context menu as shown above in the illustration and choose the option for “Copy” to copy the image to my clipboard. The problem is that I can’t go open my graphics editing program of choice. Usually that would be either IrfanView, Macromedia Fireworks or SnagIt 9.

Depending on the task at hand, the graphics program will change. The problem is that I can’t go into IrfanView or Fireworks and just paste the image from the clipboard and start editing. There’s always an error. What’s the deal? The only exception is SnagIt. If I open the SnagIt Editor application I can paste directly into it.

All the advice I’ve received is to just open a Word document or PowerPoint document and paste it into that program, which will work from the clipboard. THEN! If I right-click on the graphic again in one of those programs I can then paste the graphic in the original graphics program and do what I need to do. How annoying is that!

What is Outlook saving the image file information as for the clipboard? Why can’t my graphics programs access it?