imgtocss

Dev tools

image conversion for email

SHOW HN2011

imgtocss

Create css/html images that can't be blocked by email providers

imgtocss.com

#html email images#css images#email image embedding#inline css

11points
14comments
#752of 1,097 in 2011
Top 69%of 2011 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

2 positive, 2 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 1 critical, out of 5 comments about the project. Thread score -0.04.

Idea: 1 for, 1 againstPerformance: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Useful for transactional email clients

    From 1 comment
    • Hey, This is pretty damned useful! I'm the Product Manager of PostageApp (http://www.postageapp.com), we deal with outbound transactional email, and I have to say, this is…
      JonLim on HN
  • Converted transparent PNGs display in IE 6

    From 1 comment
    • One cool thing is that a converted transparent PNG will display properly in IE 6, even though the original doesn't: http://imgur.com/XA6OE
      dwwoelfel on HN

Objections

  • Output size is large, a concern for transactional email

    From 1 comment
    • Hey, This is pretty damned useful! I'm the Product Manager of PostageApp (http://www.postageapp.com), we deal with outbound transactional email, and I have to say, this is…
      JonLim on HN
  • Cannot handle large images because CSS is inline

    From 1 comment
    • I made this because I needed to include a few small images into emails I'm sending for a separate project. I didn't want to annoy the user with the "allow images from this…
      dwwoelfel on HN
  • Hard to monetize; newsletter publishers rely on external images for tracking

    From 2 comments
    • REALLY love the idea though. Great work! Thanks! That's really nice to read. The only problem I can see is the significant size increase in emails One of the big contributors to…
      dwwoelfel on HN
    • do you have a github repo I can watch? https://github.com/dwwoelfel My github repo is pretty barren. I probably won't put any updates there. However, I have your email from your…
      dwwoelfel on HN
  • Cross-email-client compatibility problems

    From 1 comment
    • I was just going to say I don't see any practical use-case, but you outlined one I didn't think of. One problem I foresee is the cross-email compatibility problems. It's a…
      bdclimber14 on HN

Requests

  • Reduce output size

    From 1 comment
    • If you could make the output size much more manageable, and have it actually be usable for larger images, I think newsletter publishers would love the hell out of this. The only…
      JonLim on HN

Questions

  • Why use CSS rather than data: URLs?

    From 1 comment
    • Is there a reason you need to involve css here? what's wrong with just embedding a data: url inside the html?
      beagle3 on HN
  • Who would pay for this?

    From 1 comment
    • I made this because I needed to include a few small images into emails I'm sending for a separate project. I didn't want to annoy the user with the "allow images from this…
      dwwoelfel on HN

Alternatives named

  • Embedding data: URL images directly in HTML

    From 2 comments
    • Is there a reason you need to involve css here? what's wrong with just embedding a data: url inside the html?
      beagle3 on HN
    • Email clients avoiding going out to fetch external images, because that may be used to track user reading (when the image has been fetched, you know that the email was displayed…
      beagle3 on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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