How to add a UIImage in MailComposer Sheet of MFMailComposeViewController
I want to insert a UIImages inside the compose sheet of an MFMailComposerViewController.
Please note I don't want to attach them, but I want to place them in a table using HTML code which will be the part of the email body.
Solution 1:
Back again with a new answer. I'm still leaving my previous code up though, because I'm still not convinced that there's not a way to make use of it. I'll keep at it myself. The following code DOES work. Mustafa suggests base64 encoding the images, and says that they only work Apple to Apple, but that's not actually true. Base64 encoding does work with most mail clients now (IE previously didn't support it, but now it is supported for images up to a certain size, though I'm not sure exactly what the size is). The problem is that mail clients like Gmail would strip out your image data, but there's a simple workaround for that... just putting <b> and </b> tags around your <img ...> tag is all you need to do to keep it from getting stripped out. In order to get an image into your email, you need to get a base64 encoder into your project. There are several out there (mostly C though), but the simplest ObjC one I found was called NSData+Base64 by Matt Gallagher (I took the "+" out of the name after copying it in because it gave me problems). Copy the .h and .m files into your project and be sure to #import the .h file where you plan on using it. Then code like this will get an image into your email body...
- (void)createEmail {
//Create a string with HTML formatting for the email body
NSMutableString *emailBody = [[[NSMutableString alloc] initWithString:@"<html><body>"] retain];
//Add some text to it however you want
[emailBody appendString:@"<p>Some email body text can go here</p>"];
//Pick an image to insert
//This example would come from the main bundle, but your source can be elsewhere
UIImage *emailImage = [UIImage imageNamed:@"myImageName.png"];
//Convert the image into data
NSData *imageData = [NSData dataWithData:UIImagePNGRepresentation(emailImage)];
//Create a base64 string representation of the data using NSData+Base64
NSString *base64String = [imageData base64EncodedString];
//Add the encoded string to the emailBody string
//Don't forget the "<b>" tags are required, the "<p>" tags are optional
[emailBody appendString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"<p><b><img src='data:image/png;base64,%@'></b></p>",base64String]];
//You could repeat here with more text or images, otherwise
//close the HTML formatting
[emailBody appendString:@"</body></html>"];
NSLog(@"%@",emailBody);
//Create the mail composer window
MFMailComposeViewController *emailDialog = [[MFMailComposeViewController alloc] init];
emailDialog.mailComposeDelegate = self;
[emailDialog setSubject:@"My Inline Image Document"];
[emailDialog setMessageBody:emailBody isHTML:YES];
[self presentModalViewController:emailDialog animated:YES];
[emailDialog release];
[emailBody release];
}
I've tested this on the iPhone and sent lovely image embedded emails to myself on Yahoo, my personal website, and my MobileMe. I don't have a Gmail account, but the Yahoo worked perfectly, and every source I've found says that the bold-tags are all you need to make it work. Hope this helps all!
Solution 2:
There are two ways to do this, depending on where the images are stored:
If the images are out on a server, then just include HTML <img> tags with the source URL set to the remote image. The user previewing the mail message is shown the image during composition and the receiver sees it when they open the message (unless they've disabled default image loading).
If the images are on the phone you could include them as 'inline' images. There are two steps to this. First you have to attach all the images you want to use as multi-part MIME attachments and they will need to be assigned a 'content ID' (aka cid), a filename, and Content-Disposition set to inline. Inside your HTML message body you can reference them like so:
<img src="cid:{messageid}/image.png" alt="My image" />
The bad news is, the standard iPhone mail composer mechanism doesn't allow adding this additional data to attachments. The second thing is to mark the email as having an "alternative" MIME content-type. Again, the mail composer doesn't let you do that.
The way around this is to either compose the message yourself then send it off to the mail server directly via SMTP, or have a server proxy do it for you via an SMTP relay. If you decide to go this way you might want to check out skpsmtpmessage on Google code or a service like AuthSMTP.
Once the user receives this message, however, they see a self-contained HTML message with all the inline images right there. But it's a lot of hassle to set up. The first method (putting images on server) is by far the easier way to go.
Solution 3:
For iOS 3.0 and later, please see this: Attaching an image to an email?
Example:
UIImage * image = [UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:imagePath];
[composer addAttachmentData:UIImageJPEGRepresentation(itemImage, 1) mimeType:@"image/jpeg" fileName:@"MyFile.jpeg"];
Solution 4:
Maybe this'll work for you:
How to Embedd UIImage into a Mail Composer message body
Here's what it says:
Basically, you convert your image to base64 (the base64 attached below have to be shorten cause of the message length limit, so it's not a valid image) string and embed in the image tag. I remember I've stop working on this is because the embedded image(s) are only viewable from iPhone to another iPhone, I remember testing it with Gmail, our work Outlook client with no luck display the image, when I view source the data is there. So I don't think is the so much of a spam filter issue but email clients are just smarter. While I was research this, I actually found that this is how many spammers to blast out emails with image only info so it by passes the spam filter. Damn spammers, I was going to use it for good cause but since it was pretty much useless when I found out that most mail client won't display the image. For what it's worth, here is the code.
NSString *eMailBody = @"<html>Just convert your image file to base64 to embed into the email<img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhFAFuAPcAAPf39//7/+fn59bT1u/r787Lzq0UAN7b3hhFrRhJtRA0hBA8lMYYALWytffz94wQAMa+vb26vRhNxufj5+/v78bDxvfz772+vcbHxghRCM7PzggkYyFZ1tYkCNbX1hhRzpyenO+6AN7f3gBlANauAGOW7zFl1kp95wg8pbW2tZyanHOi797f5zlx3msMAAB9CP/PAL22va2mraWipedJMSlRtf91Y72WAFqK76WmpRBFta2qrcaeAK2urfdpUuc8If39/e9ZQmPTY94wGFrLWrUkEISq9/n5+ZR5ABCWGLWOAIRpAGNRAClJlK2GAL0sGGssITG2OaWCAK3H9848KaW+762qpcbX/73jvWN5pGvTc/eGc//vCFppfIwgEJRBMYSGlPeWhJSSjHN5jMaSjKWmrb3P787V1ilBa4R9c9nXy+rq6ntNQu/y95Su3svO1kphlISa1t7b1vf7/3uGraWGexdAmoySlDm6QrWyraWqrRiiIWtpa0LDStrl/1JtrcbHzpxlWntlUklVcztZk3vbhISStfffWufr786upVmB1ta2taW21tLS0ve6rd7j5zlhtfemnJSetefn78LCw7W2vdnZ2bVFMf/3//f3/8Z1a9bb59bb3eHh4a2WjM7HxoR1OSGqKbW6xvT09JyGQrXD3v/r5+fk3s7rzufb3q2ytffXKbWiY6inp1p1WrWmjP/LxnOOzsC/v+/n56qSMffXzr2eEP/3hPHx8f//987T57m4ubVZShk5f97LjO/HKQ03ks7DpdZlWv/vMd7LxqWuvefr/86uKd66QgwyhcnJyf/ztbKxsrWqpe/37//z7///75zTpf/397Szsvfn1ozLjO/jlN7v3qWko62OEO/r5//73tbX3vf37wotd1qqYxlNvYyujN7X1qKgoHuWe5KUmkKOQhZKvildMRh5IZqZmcXEwZ2amaajoNfU0QMaTAsiV5STlSo+bZibpSti2puZl5u28pGs5pqbn9Hd8/fr94WFi7i1sBguYfP09v///ywAAAAAFAFuAAAI/wD/CRxIsKDBgwgTKlzIsKHDhxAjSpxIsaLFixgzatzIsaPHjyBDihxJsqTJkyhTqlzJsqXLlzBjypxJs6bNmzhz6tzJs6fPn0CDCh1KtKjRo0iDYinEtJAWLUSIfJv6DVFShnOMXTEzpYrXKlPMXDGW6apZhli0CHmqtk+oJC9ejDDH6azBTGaMKDLBQUKCvzoC/5XAwcSJElV0UbB71lk0PFH6CGmqxS3cuZgyAwhw1tiUEiY+CEZBunTpwR9SfyisiNGmzYyNYqlWLZrtak6JRLmcoQKBCQQswEZ6ZcUJDn0RoFiwoAkhOH/+wCHURDkKHRIII0e+uoWbSbGRYv/SFy0qnj1yM6ArUEDDAQEOOBu9UqIF3xrMCWWRBGiAnP8eqKEBBpVIkgUhyg22nWocxKJLeEMBYIEAqVSD"></html>";
NSString *encodedBody = [eMailBody stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSString *urlString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"mailto:[email protected]?subject=ImageTest&body=%@", encodedBody];
NSURL *url = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString:urlString];
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:url];
Solution 5:
(Unfortunately the following method doesn't work, but I'm leaving this post because the image URL path conversion string example is really helpful for other cases where you need HTML filepaths in your code. Please see my post on Base64Encoding for a way that does work.)
I ran into this issue myself, and I found a way that works. You CAN get the images to appear inline by using the full filepath to the image.
It takes a little conversion on your part, but use the normal methods for obtaining your app's directories (NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] resourcePath], etc...), then convert the string to a literal URL. For example, the "path" string returned above will contain something like "/Users/Me/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/3.2/Applications/25ADA98D-8DF4-4344-8B78-C18BC757EBDC/MyEmailingApplication.app".
You'll need to make this string into
"file:///Users//Me//Library//Application%20Support//iPhone%20 Simulator//3.2//Applications//25ADA98D-8DF4-4344-8B78-C18BC757EBDC//MyEmailingApplication.app//"
and then you can add your image filenames to the end. (this example points into the app resources, but the same applies for the tmp and documents directories).
You can do this string conversion with a combination of
[NSString stringWithFormat:@"file:///%@//%@",path,myImageName]
after using
[path stringByReplacingOccurencesOfString:@"/" withString:@"//"]
to fix the forward-slashes in "path", and
[path stringByReplacingOccurencesOfString:@" " withString:@"%20"]
to make the spaces HTML friendly. Now you can use this literal URL in your HTML encoded email body, like img src=\"",pathToMyImage,"\"
The example looks like a lot of work, but actually once you get it setup, it's not hard at all, and it works like a charm :-) Good luck!