Inline gif in automated e-mail?

[jws]

I am trying to send an automated message with outlook.

I want to avoid using a hosted image from a URL, and have an inline image in the mail.

This help page shows this is possible by inserting a “render at html” grid or a list, but I can’t make it work: https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051028394#:~:text=How%20can%20I,your%20HTML%20tags

Instead of the image appearing, I get either a ticked checkbox or the name of the field.

Can anyone enlighten me what is going wrong?

[jws · Accepted solution]

Thanks! It works great for just the image.

If I add the style element with 50%, it does not show up at all. If I manually type in pixels, it works. Example: style="width:641;height:455"

Is there a way to make the percentage work?

Just to make sure I am doing this the most efficient way possible, I copy to clipboard the url that is generated by the formula and paste it into the template?

To say another way, is it possible to link directly to the field reference? So that you could have a different image depending on the individual record?

[Justin_Barrett · Accepted solution]

jws:

Is there a way to make the percentage work?

The percentage should work as I described above. Note that it should read width:50%, not just 50% as you indicated. I also got it to work by only adding a width property to the style, and it auto-matched the height to the same relative value.

jws:

is it possible to link directly to the field reference? So that you could have a different image depending on the individual record?

Yes. Inside the quotes for the src property of the <img> tag, place the cursor, then click the blue + button in the upper-right corner of the template editor to insert a value from a previous step. Choose the value from the {Attachment URL} field of the triggering record, and it should look something like this:

[Justin_Barrett · Accepted solution]

Justin_Barrett:

I’ve helped a couple of clients to add images to email templates, and in both cases the easiest way that I’ve found to host the images is to create an “Images” table, with each record containing a single image in an attachment field. A formula field can be used to extract the hosted URL, and you can use that URL when building an <img> tag in the email template, along with styling to control the image size and placement.

Just a quick follow-up comment on this. The announced change to the behavior of URLs for attachments will soon prevent this method from working (or at least make it more difficult). As such, I no longer recommend it. Unfortunately I don’t have the time to investigate other options or else I’d recommend an alternative.

[database]

Hello, I'm trying to extract the URL of an attachment as indicated here, i.e., using:

IF(Attachments, REGEX_EXTRACT(Attachments, "(?:[^(]*\\()([^)]*)"))

 This successfully creates an URL ("dl.airtable.com/.attachments/........./......./...jpg"). However, when clicking on  the link, I get the following notification: "The link you're trying to visit is not available. Please visit our support center for more information. " 

Any idea why this might be happening?