Ask Siri to find photos and insert them into emails on your Mac

The introduction of Siri to the Apple Mac in macOS Sierra has opened up some interesting uses that were previously not available. For example, Siri can find photos for various uses, such as in email.

Siri understands what you say and you can simply speak commands to be performed, you can ask for information, and Siri can find it.

Apple’s digital personal assistant has many uses and here is an interesting one: Suppose you want to send someone an image in an email. Siri can help.

Wake Siri

Click the Siri button in the top right corner of the screen and the Siri widget appears.

Issue your command

Give Siri a second or two and it begins to listen. You can then say your question, issue a command, ask for information, files or photos, and so on. Let’s ask Siri to find photos of cats - everyone loves cats!

Browse Photos

Siri must know what photos you have on your Mac because if you have taken images of cats with your camera or phone, the Photos app opens and shows thumbnails of all the images containing cats.

Drag and drop

To insert one of these photographs in an email you just click and drag a thumbnail to the email message you are writing. Drop it in the body of the message.

Set the image size

When it is dropped, it is inserted. Just above the image on the right is the Image Size and it can be made smaller or larger. Original images can be several megabytes, so it is usually best to shrink them unless you really want to send them full size.

Can’t find images?

What if you ask Siri to find images with a particular subject, but there aren’t any in the Photos app? Suppose we want to insert an image of the planet Saturn in an email, We can say to Siri, “Find images of Saturn.”

Siri responds by saying none were found. However, there are two options. The first is to open the Photos app anyway, and the second is to search the web. Click the second option.

Drag and drop

Siri displays thumbnails of photos of Saturn that have been found on the web. To insert one into an email it can be clicked, dragged and dropped into the new email message.

This is an interesting use of Siri and it works for all sorts of images and not just cats and planets. Siri first looks in your Photos library for images, then if none are found, it searches the web.

Be careful what you copy from the web, because images may be copyright.