The iPad Gmail Application does not Support Images

You heard correctly, the Gmail app for the iPad does NOT support images within HTML emails. Instead it displays them as if they are blocked and as far as we can see, there is no option for turning off the image blocking.

With an ever growing population of iPad users, this creates an interesting challenge for designers - especially when it comes to image heavy emails where the primary message is embedded within a table of sliced images.

So what happens when your images are blocked? The app will only display the ALT or TITLE text in place of your images if you include a width and height attribute or CSS property. If you don't include the image dimensions, it will render as a small, grey outlined box. If you do include them, your ALT or TITLE text will display within a gray outlined box set to the original dimensions of your image. If you have included both ALT and TITLE attributes, it will display the ALT text.

For example:

or

Here is an example of our recent November email campaign:

Most of our messaging is in text but you can see that we did not include a width and height in the image associated with the Android article. Therefore it did not display the TITLE or ALT text description.

In Conclusion

We recommend that you always include an exact width and height for each of your images as well as ALT and TITLE text.