Your Knak account comes with an Image Library where you can upload and store images to use in your Knak built assets.
Your Knak contract will include a specified amount of hosting space expressed in TB. (terabytes) which you will use when hosting images in the Knak image library. You can view your hosting limit including used & remaining amounts here: https://enterprise.knak.io/account/cdn-usage
How does image hosting affect your account
When you add images to your emails and send those emails out to your recipients, the images have to be downloaded from the Knak severs to each recipient. Each time that happens you will use up some of your Knak hosting allowance. The hosting allowance is affected by:
The number of times each image is downloaded from our servers, this is generally once per email
The size of each image
These fees while very small can add up if you're sending a high volume of assets and/or are using images with large file sizes.
How to monitor CDN usage
Customers will be able to visit https://enterprise.knak.io/account/cdn-usage within their account to view current and projected CDN usage and any associated costs. This page will display your total allowed terabyte limit and current and projected usage. If you're account is over the limit or projected to go over, please reach out to your customer success manager to discuss your options.
How to minimize usage?
Optimize image file size - The bigger the image, the more it costs Knak to send the file to the end recipient. Reducing the file size of the image by reducing the image dimensions or resolution will reduce the cost and can also improve email deliverability. In most cases the file size and/or dimensions of the image can be reduced without any visual impact to the image.
File size - Should also be kept as small as possible, in most cases less than 100mb per image is more than enough for a high quality image. 300kb is the maximum size we recommend for very large images."
Image Width - Our general recommendation for image width is to use an image which is twice as large as the container its going into. For example if your email is 600px wide and you wanted a full width image, you would use a 1200px wide image. Similarly for a landing page if your landing page is 1000px wide you should use 2000px for a full width image. (It's not as important for LPs as they don't need to worry about deliverability but keeping the images small will help with page load times & help them avoid CDN overages costs)
For Animated Gifs - Ask your design team to use the least amount of frames as possible and keep the dimensions & file size as small as possible.
Here are some help documents to learn more about optimizing the size of your email: https://help.knak.io/en/articles/6773310-optimizing-email-size or https://help.knak.io/en/articles/3347061-email-module-best-practice-guide.
File size - Should also be kept as small as possible, in most cases less than 100mb per image is more than enough for a high quality image. 300kb is the maximum size we recommend for very large images.
Tools for Reducing Image Size
Here are some recommended tools to reduce your image size before you upload them into Knak!
Photopea:
A free online tool that can reduce image sizes.
Squoosh:
A free and user-friendly tool for reducing image file size or dimensions.
I tested an 800 KB image and reduced it to 11 KB using Squoosh.
Other Editing Apps:
Tools like Photoshop or other common editing apps can also easily reduce image sizes.
Host the images externally - For Marketo customers we offer an integration that allows a customer to still use our image library (including folder structure and restrictions) but the images are actually stored in your Marketo instance in a folder of your choosing, at no extra cost. More details here: https://help.knak.io/en/articles/4171499-knak-marketo-image-library-integration
For non Marketo customers you can also host images in your marketing automation platform and just copy the image URL and paste it directly into Knak
Host images in an external DAM (digital asset management) tool - Knak integrates with Adobe Experience Manager which allows you to host images externally and bring those images into Knak via an API connection, more details here.
Checking Image Sizes
Knak doesn't change the size of the image file when you download it into the image library, so if you have the original file in your personal system, you can find the size of the image.
If you do not have the original file, you can right click an image you've uploaded into Knak and click "inspect"
From here you can find the url for the image and when you hover over that link you'll be able to see the file size of the image:
Need more help? Contact Support via live chat within Knak using the chat bubble in the bottom right corner or email support@knak.com.