featured image not included in subscriber email, but other images are. Help!
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Hi! My featured image is not included in the email that subscribers to my blog receive. All other images in the post *are* included – just not the featured image. This tells me that the problem isn’t on the recipient’s end – it’s got something to do with how WordPress.com is sending out the email. My featured images are often critical content. How do I fix this? If it helps any, I’m using the Edin theme (free), but I pay WordPress an annual fee to have access to customization features.
My blog is serving as a professional portfolio of sorts, and my field is Communications Design. So this is a really unfortunate problem that I need to fix!
Thanks in advance,
Akire Bubar
akirebubar.comThe blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Actually, now I’m just more confused. By “In the theme” do you mean “only when people actually go to my blog on WordPress.com”?
I don’t get what you mean about single images vs. multiple images, but that’s not really my problem, so I’ll sidestep that for the moment.
The phrase “Featured Image” by definition implies that this image is the most important image in the post. Why on earth would you leave out the most important image but include the others?
Usually my featured image is what the whole post is about. Usually the text is just to “fill out the story”. But drawing cartoons as I sometimes do, it’s entirely possible I might make a blog post that’s ONLY a featured image. Will people then get a blank email?
As far as I can tell, Excerpts has nothing to do with email, so I’m not sure why you mentioned that.
What I think your response meant was that, simply put, featured images will never show up in emails that subscribers receive. Is that correct? Should I contact the creators of the theme and ask them if this is something they can address, or is this something they have no control over because WordPress.com doesn’t support the functionality?
Clarification would be much appreciated. Also I apologize if I sound exasperated – I appreciate that you’re trying to help. But it sounds like the only way to keep people from missing important content from my blog is to take down my subscribe buttons and discourage people from subscribing – which is beyond absurd.
All the best,
Akire Bubar
akirebubar.com -
Hi Akire,
The short explanation is that our email notifications don’t use the Featured Images. Some themes don’t display featured images either, or sometimes display them one type of page but not on another. For example, the featured image might be displayed on your Blog posts page, but not on post’s single page itself.
The phrase “Featured Image” by definition implies that this image is the most important image in the post. Why on earth would you leave out the most important image but include the others?
I’m sorry for any misunderstanding, but that’s not necessarily what the WordPress software intends for Featured Images. Featured Images are meant to be images that are not within a post’s body itself, but have some relation to the post for aesthetic purposes:
From our support article on featured images: “A featured image represent the contents, mood, or theme of a post or page.”
Given the way you post, it sounds like any featured image you decide on should also be within the body of your post, since it carries weight in your content.
Usually my featured image is what the whole post is about. Usually the text is just to “fill out the story”. But drawing cartoons as I sometimes do, it’s entirely possible I might make a blog post that’s ONLY a featured image. Will people then get a blank email?
In this example, yes the email would include the post title you include and then a link a to the post, but if the image is not in the post’s body — just in its featured image — the image will not be included in the email.
Best,
-Alex G.
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Alex, thank you for taking the time to answer my question so thoroughly. At least now I understand the situation, even if I don’t like it.
Are there any plans to change this? It’s poor design to place the image on the blog post page twice – once as the featured image, and again in the body of the post. Especially since it’s often the starting point for the post – so it would be at the top, right under the featured image – in other words, the same image would appear twice. It would look like a mistake. Since my field is communications and communications design, this kind of graphic layout gaff really isn’t acceptable to me.
Using some other image that’s not critical to the content is a waste of space and of people’s time if it’s not actually important enough to need to be in the email. Also, since the featured image is what appears when I promote my posts on social media, etc., the featured image really *needs* to be important. Also, a not-critical image is almost by definition not going to be as attention-getting. You folks may have a different interpretation of what “featured” means than I do, but I’d suggest your interpretation is less useful.
Is there some technical behind-the-scenes thing I can tweak somewhere in order for my featured image to be included in the email? It sounds like the answer is “no” – but I don’t mind having to learn a little coding or something if this is something that *can* be addressed.
If it *can’t*, I strongly urge you folks to consider making whatever changes are necessary to fix this. From my perspective, I’ve put a lot of time and and some money too into creating a website and blog here – the idea that subscribers are getting only part of my posts is kinda like a printer telling a magazine they can only print the magazine minus the cover and the first 3 pages. I just can’t see how anyone would think that’s acceptable. It would really suck to have to leave WordPress and find another platform – and truthfully, I don’t know what other problems would come along with doing that (‘the devil you know…’). I really like everything else about WordPress a great deal. But this one little thing is not a little thing to me.
Perhaps, at the very least, it should be possible to include a small line at the beginning of the email (but NOT in the blog post) that says something like,”some visual content may be missing from this email; please clink on the link to view the post in its original form” – or something to that effect?
The only other solution I can see is to take down my subscribe buttons and discourage people from subscribing. Obviously that’s a pretty terrible solution, since it’s the only way to build an ongoing connection with people who don’t have WordPress accounts and either a) don’t follow me on social media or b) follow so many people on social media that I get lost in the stream.
Thanks very much for your time.
All the best,
Akire Bubar
akirebubar.com -
There aren’t plans to change emails to include featured images, but I’ve submitted it as a feature request.
Your theme, Edin, does make prominent use of the featured image and I understand why that can be frustrating to include the image twice.
One trick to get around this would be to include your featured image again in the body of your post, but adjust the image settings to include a custom CSS class:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/images/image-settings/#advanced-options
Perhaps name the class “hide-featured” .
Then you can add this CSS to your site to hide that image:
.entry-content .hide-featured{ display: none; }It wouldn’t hide the image in the email, because your site’s custom CSS won’t effect emails, but it will hide the image within the body when folks view your site. This leaves you with only the featured image.
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This is very helpful! Thank you so much. It’s going to take me a few days to give this a try and see if I can figure it out, but I’ll let you know what happens. If I can get this to work, I’ll be a very happy camper.
Meanwhile, is there a way to send a test email to myself, rather posting and having WordPress email it to my subscribers, and and only then getting to see whether or not I sent out something horribly messed up?
Thanks so much!
Akire Bubar
akirebubar.com -
Thanks so much! It’s going to take me a few days to try this and see if I can figure it out – I’ll let you know what happens.
Is there a way I can send a test email to myself *before* posting and sending it out to my subscribers, so I can see if I’ve messed it up and fix it before it goes out?
All the best,
Akire Bubar
akirebubar.com -
er…oops…sorry about the multiple responses – I got a failed/please try again message…see why I’d like to do a test email first? :-P
– Akire
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Hi Akire,
There’s not a way to send out a notification before publishing. But what I’d recommend to test this out would be to setup a new site, follow it and subscribe to email notifications, then copy and paste your next post into that blog and publish it there before publishing it on your real site.
Steps to create a new site under your same username are here:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/create-a-blog/#adding-new-site to-an-existing-account
-Alex G.
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Hi, Alex!
I just wanted to let you know that I’ve done this several times now and it works beautifully. It wasn’t hard, and it addresses the one big problem I’ve been having. Thank you a million times over for telling me how to do this!
All the best,
Akire Bubar
akirebubar.com -
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