Gmail brings images and video to your inbox

New features come to Google Labs

19 March 2009 0:07 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Gmail customers might be in a state of worry about whether or not their email service is going to be accessible next time they log into the service, but that hasn't stopped Google launching yet more features for the email service.

On Wednesday, the company announced that users will now be able to preview images and videos from Picasa, Flickr, and YouTube without leaving the confines of their inbox.

Google has also announced that Yelp information with relevant previews will also be available.

"My email is full of links: my friends send around Youtube videos to try and get a laugh, we share Picasa and Flickr albums with photos from last weekend's camping trip, and we email around the Yelp reviews of restaurants we're considering going to next Friday night", explains Vishal Kasera a Software Engineer at Google on the company's Gmail blog.

The answer? A new Gmail Labs feature that does just that. Users turning on Picasa, Flickr, YouTube or Yelp settings in the Labs tab will allow the new elements to take effect.

Users will then see the photos it contains, as well as see photos right in the message itself for flickr and Picasa, while YouTube videos will get a play button in a similar way to how the video embeds are shown within RSS readers.