Attachment resolution decreased while emailing record

Hello, I have a table whose fields are mostly file attachments. when I ‘send record’ via email, the attachment resolution decreases and images for e.g. are pixelated upon zooming.

Also the file names are being changed from the original names.

Are there workarounds?

Have you tried use by an email automation that includes the attachments as attachments (not in the body of the message)?

@hafiz The “Send Record” command just embeds the thumbnail of the attachment, so @Kuovonne’s solution should work for you! :smiley:

I’m also curious if embedding the attachment within the body of the email — but using Airtable’s Automations instead of the “Send Record” command — will default to embedding the full size of the attachment. It might also just embed the thumbnail within the body of the email, but I’m not sure.

Of course, if all else fails, you can always access 3 different sizes of the attachment through the web API or the scripting API. Each attachment will give you 3 sizes to choose from: Small, Large, and Full Size.

For a low-code/no-code way of accessing Airtable’s API, you can always turn to Make.com, which gives you point-and-click access to the 3 different attachment sizes. You can see this in the screenshot below:

I don’t think you can embed an attachment in the body of the message using an Airtable email automation. You can include a link (either expiring or a logged-in viewer link) to an attachment in the body of the message, but not the actual raw file contents.

Ahhh, thank you for this clarification!

I Believe images attached or embedded are affected by whatever email client is used to interpret the SMTP message.

This support article from Airtable also gives another good workaround for embedding images into the body of the email – you can host the images elsewhere and then refer to them with either HTML or markdown:

hey @Kuovonne I just tried this. thanks! I added an extra field whose condition needs to be satisfied for the automation to work. Not the ideal solution but this works. Ideally I want to be able to email a record whenever, but looks like I’ll need a Make automation for that

yup echoing @Kuovonne comment in the thread, attachment cannot be embedded, but can only be a link or attachment. thanks for the call out on different attachment sizes - I’ll need it eventually

You don’t really know if that approach works. It works for your tests, but you may be using a client that camouflages the possibility that it doesn’t work for other recipients.

Declaring success involving all things SMTP is an inexact science. Success also depends on the file type. Any not-HTML-based format like EPS, PDF, SVG, or other variants will retain its original quality (and size). But the moment you include images whose formats extend from the web, SMTP clients will assert their own definition of resolution.