How to set hosted vs embedded images in Gmail

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When you insert an image in the Gmail Compose window, the image is commonly inserted as an embedded image, meaning the full content of the image becomes a part of the message body. Then when the recipient receives your email, no Internet connection is needed to view the images because all of the image data is part of the message and doesn’t need to be downloaded from a web server. Most popular email marketing systems like MailChimp and Constant Contact only allow you to use hosted images in campaigns, where the image is served with a URL and downloaded when the recipient opens the email.

Let’s discuss the differences between embedded images and el salvador phone numbers resource hosted images (also sometimes incorrectly called “linked images”).



Gmail’s “Insert photo” feature and how it behaves
Gmails insert photo feature
Notice that “Insert” is being clicked. and then that launches the Insert Photo screen. the user has already clicked the “Insert Image” icon (the mountains) in the Compose toolbar.
Using Gmail’s “Insert photo” button, if you select an image from Photos, Albums, or you Upload your own picture, and then insert it “inline,” it gets inserted as an embedded image. The only case where the image is inserted as a hosted image is if you specify a URL for the image, in which case the image remains hosted, but the URL is converted to a Google-based image URL. For example, if I use a URL from my website for an image:

image from URL

Then when I actually insert this image and send the email, the URL gets converted to:

converted image URL

So, when using a Gmail extension to send email campaigns, if the extension uses the Gmail Compose window, images are handled the same way. In GMass’s case, if you launch a Compose window, fill in the Subject, Message, and include at least one image, and then hit the GMass button to send to your email list, the emails go out with the images embedded. If, however, you use the Load Campaign feature to set the Subject and Message in the Compose, then the images are loaded as hosted images, because it’s impossible to set the Gmail Compose window programmatically to include embedded images. The Gmail Compose window can contain natively-embedded images only if you insert them using the “Insert photo” feature using the Photos, Albums, or Upload tabs.

So if the campaign you select originally had embedded images, those images are saved to a server on-the-fly, and the “img” tag “src” attribute is changed to our server using your account’s tracking domain.

Load campaign