iPhoto 6: Can’t tab into body of e-mail message with shared photo

Posted by Pierre Igot in: iPhoto
March 7th, 2006 • 2:49 pm

Select a photo in your library in iPhoto 6. Click on “Email” button. iPhoto asks to confirm some options, and then Mac OS X switches to Mail and opens a new e-mail message with the photo in the body of the e-mail message.

Now look at where the focus (blue halo) is. By default, it is on the very first field in the header, i.e. the “To:” field. That’s fine. Now fill out the field, and press the Tab key to go to the next field. Continue until you’ve filled out all the necessary fields in the header.

Now continue to press Tab.

Normally, pressing the Tab key repeatedly while in the header of a message currently being composed should eventually take you to the body of the message, i.e. eventually put the focus on the message body itself and let you start typing the text of the message. (The number of Tab keystrokes will depend on which fields/buttons are visible in your message header and on whether Full Keyboard Access is on or not.)

But in the case of an e-mail message created from within iPhoto 6, this doesn’t work. Once you have reached the very last thing you can tab into in the message header, if you press Tab one more time… nothing happens. Mail simply refuses to tab into the body of the e-mail message!

This is, as far as I can tell, a problem that is unique to messages created from within iPhoto. If you compose a new message from within Mail, there is no difficulty and you can tab into the body of the message. But with messages created from within iPhoto, you have no choice but to use the mouse to put the focus on the body of the message.

Yet another example of poor quality control at Apple…


One Response to “iPhoto 6: Can’t tab into body of e-mail message with shared photo”

  1. Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Quickies: A Sunday brunch of Mail.app links says:

    […] Pierre Igot’s eagle eye finds three things (that’s one , two , three ) wrong with the way that Mail.app and iPhoto work together to email photos. […]

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