Ensuring your images appear in the RSS block

When an RSS feed feeds your newsletter, Letterhead pulls each item’s image from the <media:content>, <media:thumbnail>, or <enclosure> node inside <item> — and, if none of those are present, falls back to an <img> tag embedded in <description>. If images are missing from your curated articles or the RSS block, the feed’s structure is almost always the reason.

Common causes

• Images embedded in <content:encoded> — an <img> tag here (especially within a CDATA section) is treated as plain text, not structured data, so it’s ignored. (An <img> inside <description> is different — see the fallback below.)
• Missing image nodes — if none of <media:content>, <media:thumbnail>, <enclosure>, or an <img> in <description> appear inside <item>, there’s nothing to extract.

For details on <media:content>, see the Media RSS Specification.

Image URL guidelines

• No CDATA wrapping — a URL inside CDATA is read as plain text.
• Keep URLs simple — for example <media:content url="https://website.com/image.jpg"/>. Avoid special characters like # and ;, and don’t carry more of a query string than the image actually needs.
• Make sure the URL says what the image is — usually that’s a common file extension (.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .webp, or .svg), which is still the most reliable option. Some photo services leave the extension off and name the format in the query string instead — Unsplash, for one, addresses each photo by ID and adds fm=jpg — and those come through too. The address Letterhead has to skip is the one that never names the format at all.
• Don’t use <image> inside <item> — per the RSS 2.0 spec, <image> belongs to <channel> (whole-feed metadata) and can’t describe an individual article.

Best practices

1. Validate the feed with the W3C Feed Validator.
2. Follow the RSS 2.0 specification for structure.

If your feed itself is thin on metadata but the linked webpages have good images, advanced feed crawling can pull them from the page instead.

While you fix the feed

Even without images, the RSS block can still display each item’s title, excerpt, publish date, source, and author — so your newsletter keeps working while you restructure the feed.