Pictures included in Quotes

Hi Michelle,

We spoke of this a while ago, but I can't find the thread. Are we going to be able to include pictures soon?

I do not use your quote response, still, due to this. I firmly believe that it helps to have a picture or two where the potential renter remembers your house.

Thanks,
Claudia

Hi Michelle,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

As you know, we don't yet have the ability to include pictures in the email editor through an easy point-and-click image selector.

However, you CAN include images if you know how to edit and use HTML directly. Notice the HTML button on the email editor all the way to the right. That opens a pop-up form that lets you edit the raw HTML body of the message. If you know how to host and image publicly and reference it in HTML, you can do this already.

I'm willing to help you with this. Send me the email you use with images, and I'll show you how to prepare the HTML. It might be a little confusing to start but that will get you started in the right direction.

Eventually, we would like to include an easier point-and-click image selector so that you don't have to modify the HTML manually. If I'm being honest, though, that is not on the priority list at all. There dozens of other things that would take priority over that.

Hope this helps,

-Michelle

Thanks. I wil think about it. For now, I will continue to send my own quotes manually and just use the booking side of your system.

Claudia

I'd like to learn how to do this through HTML. Since we have a 4-plex, I'd like to have each quote show specific pictures of the property, and now that you have custom fields, this is very easy to do in the quote!

Can you send me a small snippet of HTML code I could use with a few random pictures and a description of where I'd store my pictures so I could just replace your pictures with mine?

Thanks!

I've been slow in responding to Claudia about this one (sorry, Claudia!) but I am getting around to it eventually.

Here are some quick steps for those of you that want to attempt it on your own:

1) Take whatever image you want to use and upload to a image hosting service. Basically, that means a web service or website that will upload your original image file and give you a public URL where it can be seen. imgur.com is probably the best. It's free, featureful and easy to use.

2) As an example, here's an image of an old cabin that I just uploaded to imgur.com:

https://i.imgur.com/6fj1jnl.jpg

After upload, they give you some tools that will show you the URL to use. You want to use the "direct link" option so that the URL goes directly to the image and not an intermediary page.

3) Now that you have your image publicly hosted, you'll want to use that in your OwnerRez emails. Here is a sample chunk of HTML that you can insert into your emails:

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/6fj1jnl.jpg" style="width:250px;" />

The 'src' attribute is where you put your image URL. Put the image URL inside the quotes exactly as you see above.

4) Use the 'style' attribute to change the image in other ways such as varying the width, height or border. For instance, here I'm adding a 5 pixel red border around the image:

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/6fj1jnl.jpg" style="width:250px;border:solid 5px red;" />

You can see how the above HTML looks by going to this URL in your browser:

http://fiddle.jshell.net/Fn5tV/show

JSFiddle is a great online tool you can use to play with HTML and see how it looks. Go to http://jsfiddle.net and put your HTML in the appropriate frame, then click the Run button to see how it looks.

5) After you have configured the HTML to look exactly as you want, copy that into your OwnerRez email template using the HTML editor button. Do NOT copy it directly into the message body. You must click the 'HTML' button on the editor toolbar and insert it there. You will have to determine where in the existing HTML is the correct place to put it. Make sure that your new image HTML does not break existing HTML that is already there. If you don't understand where to put it, to get your image to show up in the correct spot, feel free to ask us for help.

Perfect. I will try this!

That worked great. Thanks for the tip, it got me started!

What's kinda cool is once you embed one picture you can then use the WYSIWG editor to move them around, etc. so you don't need to be an expert in HTML to do this!

Damon

Glad it worked! One caution - be careful to use as small/compressed images as possible that you're inserting into your templates. If you put big massive high rez images on Imgur and then link to those, every single email will take awhile to load for your guests. A lot of times, you can shrink the **file size** (not the viewable size) of the image by using different compression programs.