Images in email

Images in email are not images on a web page. Mail clients (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Yahoo) each strip, rewrite, or block things a browser would happily render. This page covers the rules Plume follows for you and the few you need to know about.

Upload or paste a URL

In the campaign editor, add an Image block and either:

Upload a file — Plume stores it on your own server and inserts the finished URL, or
Paste a URL to an image you already host somewhere public.

Either way the image is referenced by an absolute URL in the sent email. Relative paths and embedded (base64 / cid:) images are deliberately avoided — Gmail strips embedded images, and relative paths have nothing to resolve against inside an inbox.

Use PNG, JPG, or GIF — nothing else

Plume accepts PNG, JPG, and GIF and rejects everything else on upload. That’s not a limitation, it’s the reality of email:

SVG is blocked or stripped by almost every major client (and is an XSS vector) — never use it in email.
WebP / AVIF don’t render in Outlook and older clients.

If you paste a URL, point it at a PNG/JPG/GIF too.

Every reader can hide your images

This is unavoidable and applies to every email tool, not just Plume. Most clients don’t load remote images until the reader clicks “Display images” (or has whitelisted the sender). Outlook and corporate mail often block them by default. So:

Always write alt text. It’s the only thing a reader sees when images are off — the editor nudges you for it on every image block.
Never put essential words inside an image. Your unsubscribe link, offer, or call-to-action must exist as real text, not baked into a picture.
Expect a meaningful share of opens to happen with images off. That’s normal.

Sizing — Plume handles Outlook for you

Modern clients respect CSS, but Outlook (desktop) ignores max-width and will render an image at its full pixel size — blowing your layout apart. Plume sets an explicit width attribute on every image (defaulting to the 600px content width, never upscaling) so it sizes correctly everywhere, Outlook included. You don’t have to do anything.

For crisp images on high-DPI (“retina”) screens, upload at roughly 2× the display size — e.g. a 600px-wide banner looks best uploaded at ~1200px. Plume caps the displayed width so the larger file just renders sharper, not bigger.

One-time setup: `storage:link`

Uploaded images are served from your public/storage directory, which is a shortcut (a symlink) pointing at storage/app/public. The installer creates it for you, and on almost every host that’s the end of it.

A few shared hosts block symlinks, and the installer deliberately doesn’t fail the install over it — so the first sign is uploaded images showing as broken. To create the link yourself, on cPanel, without a command line:

Open Cron Jobs in cPanel.
Add a new job set to Once Per Minute, with this command (substitute your real path):
```
cd /home/yourusername/plume && php artisan storage:link
```
Wait a minute, check that your images now load, then delete the cron job — it only needs to run once.

If your host offers Terminal in cPanel, run the same command there instead and skip the cron dance. If images still don’t load, the host is blocking symlinks outright — their support can create the public/storage → storage/app/public link for you. Once public/storage/... serves your uploads over HTTPS, image blocks work.