Gmail has finally added a feature that has been a long time in coming, but like so many other new features, it’s in the Labs.

Most email services have had inline image embedding for ages, but Gmail, which just celebrated its 5th birthday, has been lacking this feature up until now. Just announced today, Gmail now supports image embedding, but like so many other new features as of late, you have to go and turn it on in your settings.  For those unfamiliar with the process, you need to go to “Settings” at the top of the screen, click on the “Labs” tab, and scroll down until you find “Inserting images”.  Once you have it up and running you’ll see an icon up in the tools that will let you insert images from your own hard drive, or even enter the URL of an image from a website and it will be inserted.

Why this particular feature took so long to be added is a mystery, but it is even bigger mystery why absolutely new feature that comes to Gmail has been part of Labs lately instead of just added directly to the service.  An even bigger mystery is why when they do add these features, they show up in Gmail, but not their Apps version of the service that webmasters use for quite some time.  A universal roll out of these new features would be nice, and it would also be nice to see them be situations where users don’t have to go and turn them on.  We can at least all dream of that day.