You obviously have not looked at iPhoto 11. It no longer integrates with mail. It has it's own built in mail module that is useless, does not work with Exchange and is a piece of junk!
10 steps back on email sharing: the way i prefer to share photos.
Lame to launch the new version without Exchange support - I'm about to go waste some time figuring out if I can cope using some automator script. Sure wish the iPhoto team had time for the basics before their next round of innovation.
First of all, please don't blame Apple for this. Exchange is not standards-compliant. Your workplace probably has an SMTP server for standards-compliant equipment. That's what you need.
But the latest iphoto update in software update now gives you the option to use an external e-mail client. In practice, this only works with Mail at least in previous versions, which is why the internal mail "client" is so great.
Just to clarify, the external mail client setting is what you want if you want Exchange support. It is supported in the latest update. An SMTP server from your workplace/mailhost may provide another solution. Try smtp.yourdomain.com or smtp.yourisp'sdomain.com.
www.pobox.com also allows you to use SMTP for a fee with some restrictions.
I will blame Apple for this given the FACT that Exchange has always been 2003, 2007, and 2010 SMTP standards compliant.
There's no excuse for this in iPhoto given the other FACT that Microsoft Mac Office 2011 supports Apple and the Mac and the least Apple could do is support that by allowing Outlook 2011 support in things like iPhoto 11 and contact lists from Outlook 2011 in FaceTime for the Mac which they don't support in the beta today.
You obviously have not applied the iPhoto 9.1.1 updater. With it you can now select Mail as the email client of choice in iPhoto's General preference pane:
Nope. I'm on 9.1.1 and while that screenshot shows mail, what you don't understand is that despite having Outlook 2001 installed it gets recognized as Microsoft Entourage. Wrong again.
Even when selecting this is you go to the 'Share' menu on iPhoto '11 the 'Email...' menu item is still unavailable.
I'm sorry, but who else do we blame for loosing functionality that works perfectly fine with the previous version of Office email client (Entourage) but not with the new Outlook 2011? Apple needs to put out an update asap so one can use iPhoto in conjunction with this widespread application.
The built-in email thingie is horrible, I don't want to sent silly themed emails, I just want to type a few lines and attach my photos. I do not want them inline with my message, because that makes it tedious for the receiving party to file the photos.
I do not use Mail because it does not meet my needs as an email client. I've tried, many times, it's not flexible enough, debating that is irrelevant to this discussion.
I do not think it is unreasonable to expect Apple to support the current version of Microsoft Office in iPhoto.
Use the Photo browser in Outlook - that's what it's for and send Plain text emails, that way you recipients will receive the photos and they won't be embedded in the message.
I guess that works ok, but never tried dragging the photo into anything other than the body of the message. Looks like if you drag it into the header where the To: line is it will attach it nicely, but at full size...which would be around ~2.5MB for an iPhone 4 image.
Would be nice to be able to quickly resize these before sending down to something more manageable in email like 1024 x 768 to keep the email size down....never mind I see how to do it now.
Leave iPhoto with it's defaults as iPhoto for email, and instead Export the photo so you can change the quality and size and with custom you can select the exact size in pixels both Height and Width.
Then again I guess that's why people use Flickr and the like.