Over the last few years, clients have submitted support tickets requesting specific formatting options for event invitation images to best make use of the space provided in invitation emails and Lyrek RSVP pages, as well as impact their invitees.
You can find a basic synopsis of the image file requirements on the
"Create Event" or
"Edit Event" pages
(figure 01 below), where Lyrek recommends you resizing images to be
< 600px x 400px at 72ppi (pixels per inch), and compressing the files down to 50KB or less. In order for images to be visible on the web, they
must also be formatted as RGB, instead of CMYK, greyscale or another color gamut.
Figure 01. Context-sensitive Help Icon Furthermore, smaller images will also load faster on invitee email clients. Everyone at some point has had the situation where they think an email is blank because the content of the mail is below the scrolled window and there's only blank space where the absurdly large image is waiting to load. The key to Lyrek is providing concise, well-formatted information and using oversized images and obscurring the invitation text is counter-productive to this goal.
Make sure that when you save images to be used in event invitations, you adhere to the above size recommendations and gamut instructions and also name the file in a format best-condusive to web settings. This means the file should be 16 characters long, alpha-numeric, and not include punctuation or spaces. They also should include the file extension (.gif, .jpg, .png, etc.) where JPG files are recommended. Mac users be careful! Most macs, by default, either don't show or don't include extensions in file names.
The following is a good example of an image name:
John_Smith_Event.jpgThe following is a bad example of an image name:
John Smith.Event!Note that spam blockers not only search text content of emails (See
"Preventative measures can help your emails from becoming false positives") but images as well. Stay away from naming invitation images things like "banner" or "ad" as they may be blocked from email clients or, even worse, may stop the whole email from going through. In a worst case scenerio, simply naming an image "ad" may block your entire Lyrek mail server from reaching invitees on largescale network.
If you have the luxury of using
Adobe Photoshop, click
"Image Size" under the
"Image" menu
(Figure 02, below) and ensure that the image dimensions (set to pixels) are
less than 600px wide and 400px tall. Keep the
"Constrain Proportions" box checked to ensure your image doesn't get stretched. Also make sure that the
Pixels Per Inch (PPI) is set to 72, a default for the web.
Figure 02. Photoshop "Image Size" feature Note that there's a "
Save for Web" feature
(Figure 03, below) that takes care of a lot of your image optimization work for you. Under the
"File" Menu, click
"Save for Web" and make sure that your image is between
65%-85% compression. For most monitors, users won't see much of a difference in file quality, but they'll notice a much faster download time. You can see the file size change as you drag that slider to the left and right. Keep in mind, we'd ideally like the image to be
24KB or less, but can go as high as 50KB without too much of a delay in client downloads. As mentioned before, select "JPEG" from the file save options.
If the image is more of an icon or line art than a photograph, you'll find that GIF files tend to be smaller. In this case, try a GIF instead.In the sample below
(Figure 03), the image is set to
JPEG, at 65% compression and the file size is less than 4KB. In real world situations, your image would probably be larger than this sample.
Figure 03. Photoshop "Save for Web" feature If the option is unlit or unselectable, it's probably because your color gamut is CMYK. Go to the
"Image" menu (where we changed the Image Size) and click
"Mode" to show the different color gamuts. Make sure your image is set to
"RGB".
Figure 04. Photoshop Change Color Gamut Once you have everything sized and compressed correctly, save the file with the naming conventions discussed above (16-characters, alpha-numeric, without punctuation or spaces, with an extension and without "ad" or "banner" in the name) and you're ready to go!
If you have further questions about mail formatting, feel free to submit a support ticket and a technician will be happy to walk you through the process. Thanks!
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