Should I Embed Image On Email?

PHP
1

Hi,

I am trying to develop an email to include the logo. However I dont know whether it is best to provide an image link to display the image or to embed the image.

Is there are ‘standard’ way to do this?

Embed images appears to be quite difficult.

2

It’ve very easy to embed an image. There are many converters that turn the image into base64 code, which you then paste into your HTML. However, before considering it, be aware of the pitfalls:

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/1759/embedding-images-revisited/

3

From what that article is saying one pitfall shared by many webmail scripts is that they don’t fully comply with the email standards and therefore embedded images may not display there (as compared to linked images which never display anywhere unless the recipient turns off some security).

For a logo it doesn’t really matter if some people don’t see it and so embedding it should be perfectly acceptable.

4

Thanks,

So do companies such as LinkedIn embed their image.

I found this site http://webcodertools.com/imagetobase64converter/Create is that what I would to convert an image?

5

I doubt it. I don’t think I’ve ever received an email with an embedded image, TBH.

I found this site http://webcodertools.com/imagetobase64converter/Create is that what I would to convert an image?

Yep, that’s the sort of thing. There are lots of online tools like that. There is also a Firefox add-on that I know of. Or, you can even do it yourself with a simple PHP script:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">

<title>Experiment</title>
	
<style media="all">

</style>
	
</head>
<body>

<?php
function data_uri($file, $mime) {
    $contents = file_get_contents($file);
    $base64 = base64_encode($contents);
    return "data:$mime;base64,$base64";
}
?>
 
<img src="<?php echo data_uri('myimage.png', 'image/png');
?>" alt="An image of something">

</body>
</html>

Just put your image in the same file as that code, and Bob’s your uncle. :slight_smile:

6

Hi,

Im confused by this tbh.

So does this code attach the image to the email? How does it read where the image is stored on the website host?

<?php
function data_uri($file, $mime) {
    $contents = file_get_contents($file);
    $base64 = base64_encode($contents);
    return "data:$mime;base64,$base64";
}
?>

<img src="<?php echo data_uri('myimage.png', 'image/png');
?>" alt="An image of something">
7

If you create a page on your site with the above code, and place the image you want encoded in the same folder as the page with the code on it, when you open the page in your browser, the encoded data you need will be displayed on the page. ‘myimage.png’ is the name of the file and the path to it, so you’ll need to change that to the actual file name of your image, but that’s the only change you need to make—well, maybe update the alt text too. :slight_smile:

8

Emails with embedded images are very rare - they really stand out though as they are the only emails that have images in them - all the rest just have blank spaces where the sender wanted the images to appear (and which don’t because of security settings).

If you want to see an example of the difference between embedded and linked images then go to http://www.felgall.com/php2.htm and enter your email address in the form just below the “Calling the Script” heading and you can send yourself a sample email generated by my form2mail script that includes an embedded image. If you view the source of the email you will be able to see how that image is defined in the email.