This is an important notification of a bug with the Microsoft iOS app for Outlook – version 2.4.5 – especially if you are creating transparent png files on your iPhone.
If you are creating content on your phone as a mobile journalism or brand journalist or even a social media marketer, you will know how important the ability of retaining files in the format that you create them is when you transfer your content from your device to other systems for example your laptop.
I regularly create content on my phone including transparent png files which I then import into articles, presentations and video content. Typically if I need to get access to content quickly I email the images I have created to myself via Outlook (I am an Office 365 user) using the share bar in the iPhone. Yes I also have an Android device, but most of my visual content is created on my iPhone 6.
I can then save the image on my hard drive and import it to wherever I need to use it.
This has worked really well until recently when I noticed an issue.
Every png file I sent myself was being converted to a jpeg file.
Why is this important? Well it means that all the transparent png files i was sending were being converted to a jpeg and therefore were unable to be used as I needed in my visual content.
I checked the metadata on my files on the phone and could see they were png files – but as soon as I received the email from myself created by the share tool on the camera roll I could see they were now jpegs.
I also tested sending the png files to myself via the Outlook app and creating an email to myself – and again the png file was converted to a jpeg.
I know not everyone likes the Microsoft product suite, but for me it works really well. And one of the things I have found is that especially for in-app support on the iPhone for Outlook, the team is very responsive (unfortunately I can not say the same when it comes to other apps such as their Facebook Live integration on desktop).
I reached out to Office support with the details of the issue. If you ever need to reach them you will find the contact area through Settings in your iOS app.
They of course went through the basic issues to check if I was having issues with other accounts and what apps I was using to create the images and then escalated the issue for investigation.
As I suspected this is an issue with the app – they tested on their end, and yes, it does convert the PNG to JPEG and they also apologised for the error.
At the time of writing this article they have submitted an issue to the engineering team – though no time frame is available for when it will be corrected. Perhaps if you are finding this error when you use the Outlook app you might want to report it too as that may help the update get higher on the list of the engineering team!
This is really irritating glitch especially if you are a mobile journalist and content creators. So what can you do until the issue gets fixed?
Well my work around is to use my other trusty tool in my mobile journalism toolbox – share via the camera roll to a specific folder in the Dropbox iOS app and then download the png file from Dropbox on my desktop.
By the way of you are not using Dropbox at the moment you can create a free account and access 500 MB of bonus space by registering with this link (note if you do this I too will be given free space by Dropbox too as I referred you to the platform).
I hope you found this article of assistance if like me you have found this error with Outlook iOS app v 2.4.5 – let’s hope it gets resolved soon.
