From:
Dr. Beau Webber [J_dot_B_dot_W_dot_Webber_at_kent_dot_ac_dot_uk]
Sent: 26 April 2006
15:29
Subject: RE: images - emailing efficient
formatted announcements with photos, posters and
flyers
Bands and organisers of events go to some trouble to
produce good looking emails with photos, and posters and flyers describing
events.
However these frequently require a vast amount of web
space and transmission bandwidth compared with simple text
announcements.
Thus it has frequently been the practice of
organisations that forward such emails, such as SEFAN, to strip out photos
and attachments so as not to swamp some users with too much data. Similarly
KentFolk has mainly posted text on the News web pages, as each
attachment or photo has to be handled individually and converted for the
web, and photos frequently have to be resized for the
web.
There is a simple answer to this problem - rather than
embedding photos or sending photos, posters and flyers as attachments, to
just include a link to the photo, poster or flyer on the
web.
Two examples :
Embedded picture
Pointer to
picture on web
- this takes up space on everyones
machine - this is just a line of text ...
How
does one include pictures in ones' emails this way ?
Well
one problem is that one has to have at least one copy of the
picture/poster/flyer on the web somewhere - this then saves everyone else having
to keep a copy - for how many people is this a problem, that can not
upload to the web anywhere ? (Google Page will give everyone 100MByte
of free space to do this, but it has not quite reached the
UK).
The
picture/poster/flyer does not have to be embedded in an html document
(though it can be, see below).
When
one directly embeds a picure in one's email, one includes a picture from ones
hard drive, say :
./Images/pic1.jpg
This image gets encoded and embedded into the email, which has a pointer
to it in the appropriate place that looks something like :
src="cid:692025308_at_09042006-0eef"
Thus one way to re-point to a picture/poster/flyer on the web is just to do a search
and replace on the src entry in one's email text,
so for
an image at :
the src line becomes
However the easy way to do this is just use ones email
editor to "insert picture", and then instead of browsing to an image
on ones hard disk one just pastes into the "Picture Source" box the URL
: http://www.someband.com/pastgigs/pic5.jpg.
Job done,
the email is only a few 10s of bytes larger, not many kByte, yet still has the
picture.
(I am
assuming you have permission to use the
picture.)
One way
to find the name of the image is to right click on it and chose properties,
where one can copy and then paste the address (URL).
Are
there any other differences ? - This way the reader of the email can choose just
to read the text, or to download the picture over the web and see the email in
its full glory ... and KentFolk and other web pages can easily display the email
with pictures on the web.
I hope
this makes sense,
cheers,
Beau Webber
Hi Beau,
I'd agree that links to images are going to be the best way to put
images or whole fliers into an email. Perhaps you could write
a paragraph or two on how to send efficient formatted announcements
and
we'll put it on our web site as one of our "How To" sheets.
Thanks for thinking of this, it hadn't occured to me.
AJ
......
thanks again,
cheers,
Beau
Webber
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anthony John Allen - Chair of the board
Penny Allen - General
Manager
Sarah Leverton / Ben Schwausch (youth project
placements)
South East Folk Arts Network:
Registered Charity in England and Wales, No:
1111883
Company Limited by Guarantee No: 5114495
89 Hollingbury Park Avenue, Brighton, BN1 7JQ
Tel. +44 (0)1273 541453
Fax. +44 (0)1273 554189
