Images in a proposal

An image block and a section background both need a picture. There are three places one can come from.

Where an image comes from

Source	How you get it
An upload (assetId)	A file you put in your workspace. Crop and rotate happen in Pural, so you rarely prepare a file elsewhere first.
An external URL (imageUrl)	Any absolute URL. Nothing is copied into your workspace — the recipient’s browser loads it from wherever it lives.
A built-in background	The backgrounds Pural ships with, offered in the background picker.

The upload and the URL are exclusive: a block uses one or the other, never both.

An external URL is only as reliable as its host

Pural does not validate the host of an external URL, and it does not copy the file. If the URL is wrong, or the host takes the image down later, the proposal reaches your client with a broken image and nothing in the editor warns you. Look at the section in preview before sending.

Stock photography

An AI assistant can search stock photography and place a result directly, which is the practical way to get a proposal illustrated without hunting for files yourself. It sees the actual pictures rather than filenames, so it can pick one that suits the section.

Two things worth knowing:

• The hourly search quota is shared across everyone in the workspace, so an assistant is told to search once per section and reuse what it found.
• Results that carry a stricter licence are filtered out before you ever see them.

If stock search is unavailable — no quota left, or not configured — an assistant is instructed to continue without an image rather than invent a URL.

Where images belong

An image earns its place or it is decoration. A useful rule of thumb, and the one the guided prompt follows:

Section	Images
Cover	One, as a full-height background with a legibility layer
Team, testimonials	One per person
Features, benefits	One per item
Introduction, summary	One or two
Pricing, scope, closing	None

A photo behind a full-height cover does more for a proposal than the same photo squeezed into a column. And a proposal that is nothing but text reads as a memo — the opposite failure is just as real.

Images as a background

A background image switches automatic contrast off, which is the one thing to remember about them. Text no longer adapts to what is behind it, so pair every background image with a legibility layer — imageOpacity, an overlay, or contentFill. See Image backgrounds and legibility.

Cropping surprises

objectFit: "cover" with a fixed aspect ratio crops to fill. That is what you want for a row of images that should look even — and it is also how a portrait ends up cropped through someone’s head at 1:1. A settings list cannot show you that. The preview can.