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by sillysaurusx 22 days ago
> Most people I know e-mail files to themselves

It would be nice if that still worked. My resume exists in an iCloud drive, and I spent ten minutes on my phone trying to figure out how to attach it to a gmail message before giving up. "Copying" a file isn't even a well-defined operation anymore. (Or at least "pasting" doesn't always paste it.)

4 comments

It’s literally: click the paper clip logo in Gmail, tap files, pick your file.

You can also just go into the files app, tap and hold, tap copy, go to Gmail tap and hold in your draft email, tap paste.

There’s other paths that work too, like hitting the “send to” logo in files and then selecting Gmail.

It’s really the exact same patterns I might use on a computer for the most part.

Google will often convert it to a gdrive thing instead. So you're not sending the file, just a link to the file uploaded somewhere. I'm not sure what heuristic it uses, but sometimes when mailing photos like half of them are included in the mail and half automagically uploaded to gdrive instead.
Anything over 25mb goes out via gdrive if memory serves. That’s at least how it used to be.
email providers have limits for size. Modern files are huge.
Yeah but it's the silent conversion that irks me. My email is no longer self contained or archivable. When I find it again in the future, the files might be gone.
That sounds like some kind of weird google interface issue. Maybe try using IMAP or POP or whatever standard they still deign to support.
Thanks. I saw Photos and Drive, and apparently I missed "Attachments".

Still, copy-pasting a file should work. It's unclear what "copy" even does.

When you get stuck in a task like this, you realize that civilization will collapse with a whimper.
Sharing files between apps and file management in general on iOS is atrocious.

I assumed this was a solved problem before Windows 98 (first desktop OS I used), but Apple cannot get this right 28 years later.

At least there is a Files app these days, and many iOS apps interoperate a little bit with “Files”.
Funnily enough, Windows 98 is the first OS I remember with a sharing menu (“Send To”, which is memorable to me because the official Russian localization of it was suggestive of an obscenity). It seemed so pointless back then.
with llms, you'd think we could use email as a passthrough proxy