Linked or inline image - Help me choose the right option!
When trying to decide if you should include an image as a linked or an inline image, there is one main question you have to answer for yourself:
What is most important to me?
- The images shall be displayed to the recipients with as few problems as possible!
This would be important if the images are essential to your message, for example if the message would look very ugly if the images are not being displayed, or if the images themselves contain important parts of the message.
-> You should include images as inline images, so that they are (likely) not blocked by the recipients' email clients.
- The message size shall be as small as possible!
This would be important if you have very many recipients and/or many images in the message, and you do not want to impact the delivery time of the message negatively by the higher amount of network bandwidth that would be consumed by the image data.
-> You should include images as linked images, so that they do not require any of your bandwidth.
- The images shall not appear as attachments!
This would be important if you do not like the fact that many email clients display inline images also as attachments (in addition to displaying them in the message itself). Especially if you also include attachments of your own, and you do not want your attachments to "get lost" among the list of image attachments.
-> You should include images as linked images, so that they do not show up as attachments.
Do you want know more about the differences between linked and inline images? See here for a detailed description.