RSS Feeds are a popular way for news-sites, blogs, online-shops and more to share their latest articles with other software like feed readers. But can RSS Feeds contain images?
The short answer: Yes, RSS Feeds can contain images!
How RSS Feeds include images
While RSS Feeds were primarily made for text-content, there are ways to include images in RSS Feed items. Here is the best way to do it:
If you are using a CMS like WordPress, chances are high there is a plugin or built-in solution to enable images in your RSS Feeds. For example, for WordPress, there is the Add Featured Image to RSS Feed Plugin to do this in an easy way.
If you are generating your RSS Feed in your code, you need to add you images into the XML tags of the Feed:
The most popular way to add a "featured image" to your RSS items is by adding an HTM <img> tag inside a CDATA section to the item's description. Example:
<description><![CDATA[<img src="https://example.org/image.png"/>]]></description>
While this is the most common way to add an image to a feed item, there are many other ways how feeds may embed images. Some put them as standard <img> tags into their descriptions, add them inside <enclosure> or <media> tags or something similar.
If you are looking to parse RSS Feeds and extract their images, this can be quite challenging. Luckily, RSS API solves this: we provide an easy-to-use API where you can send us an RSS Feed URL, and we'll extract all data - including images - sanitize it, and return it to you in a unified, structured JSON response. This helps you parse all kinds of RSS Feeds easily, no matter how they've encoded and embedded their data.