How images travel in email

A picture in your email lives on the web, and the email holds its address. When a reader opens the email, their mail app fetches the picture from there. Nothing is attached, so an email full of photos is still small.

That one fact explains most of what you’ll notice about images:

• Some readers see the description first. A mail app can hide pictures until the reader asks to see them. Instead, the app shows each picture’s description, so a good one carries your meaning either way. See Describe an image for readers who can’t see it. If a reader says the pictures are missing, see Why can’t they see the images in my email?
• Pictures fit the phone. A picture fills the width of its spot and shrinks with the screen, so a phone shows the whole picture, smaller.
• A cropped photo goes out as a copy. A mail app can’t crop a picture on its own. So when you zoom or shape a photo, Jounce makes a cropped copy as it sends, and the email links to that copy. Your original in Your images is never changed.
• A GIF goes out as it is. Add one the way you add any picture, and it is sent unchanged. Jounce never crops a GIF, because a copy would lose its motion. Whether it moves in the inbox is up to the reader’s mail app. See Add an image to your email.
• Fill every empty spot before you send. In every email you create, an empty picture keeps the send button off. Fill it or delete it. In an email that opens in the earlier editor, an empty photo spot is left out. The Review step points it out before you send. An empty photo inside a designed layout there goes out as a striped placeholder, and the Review step doesn’t flag it, so fill it first.
• A video is a picture with a link. An email can’t play video. A Video block sends the video’s picture with a play button, linked to YouTube or Vimeo. See The Video block.

Words still matter

Spam filters and screen readers read words, not pictures. When most of an email is images, the Review step says so: Most of this email is images. Anyone who doesn’t see them gets a short description of each one, not your words. Add your main point as text. It’s advice, not a block; the email still sends.

Almost no live text at all is different: Jounce won’t send that email. See What Jounce checks before it sends.

The designed layouts that go out as a single picture carry their words as live text where they can: real words, not part of the picture. See The layout library.

Check it before you send

Preview shows the email as it goes out, with the crops applied and each block at its sent size. See Preview your email.