Embedding an image twice in one email

[KKSzymanowski]

Is there any built-in functionality for embedding the same image several times in one email?

If I do

<img src="{{ $message->embed($path) }}" />
<img src="{{ $message->embed($path) }}" />

recipient receives a message with two identical attachments.

One way I can get it to attach it once is to save the CID of an attachment and use it twice:

<?php $cid = $message->embed($path); ?>
<img src="{{ $cid }}" />
<img src="{{ $cid }}" />

Do you know any other options?
Maybe the Illuminate\Mail\Message::embed should check if the same file path occurred before in the message and if so, return the previous CID instead of generating a new one.
It would look something like this:

/**
 * CIDs of files embedded in the message.
 *
 * @var array
 */
protected $embeddedFiles = [];

/**
 * Embed a file in the message and get the CID.
 *
 * @param  string  $file
 * @return string
 */
public function embed($file)
{
    if(isset($this->embeddedFiles[$file])) {
        return $this->embeddedFiles[$file];
    }

    $cid = $this->swift->embed(Swift_Image::fromPath($file));

    $this->embeddedFiles[$file] = $cid;

    return $cid;
}

It will be a breaking change only in an edge case when someone changes the file contents between two calls to embed, so it's probably nothing to worry about.

[tomschlick]

Probably a good thing to add...

I'm just curious what the use case is though? Why would you want to embed the exact same image twice?

[garygreen]

Why would you want to embed the exact same image twice?

Maybe the site logo? One on the header and one on the footer? Dunno. Seems like a good thing to support.

[KKSzymanowski]

@tomschlick
I can tell you my use case. My client wants a big logo at the top of the email as well as a small one in the footer.
The logo weighs about 40kB and with several thousand emails sent daily(most to which customers respond) it makes quite a difference in server space to reduce the email size from ~80kB to ~40kB.
Of course I could compress the small footer logo to ~10kB but 40kB is still better than 50kB.

[tomschlick]

Ah ok, I wasn't thinking about things like that. I was thinking more along the lines of photo attachments.

👍 from me. You're probably good to submit a PR on this. I don't see how it could be a bad thing to do this.

[KKSzymanowski]

@taylorotwell Can I have your opinion about this before submitting a PR?

[taylorotwell]

Sounds ok to me.

[garygreen]

All merged, can be closed now? 😄

[KKSzymanowski]

Sure.