Attachments in Ticketing | Zoho Desk

Attachments in Ticketing

Attachments show up in more places in Zoho Desk including tickets, the Help Center, the Knowledge Base, agent signatures, macros, email templates, and more. Each location has its own size limit, and visibility rules.

Understanding attachments

An "attachment" is any file associated with a record, most commonly a ticket, but also knowledge base articles, contacts, and other modules. Attachments can arrive in three ways:
  1. Customer-supplied - a file a customer includes in an inbound support email, or uploads when submitting a ticket through the Help Center or a web form.
  2. Agent-supplied - a file an agent manually uploads to a ticket, comment, article, or reply.
  3. System/API-supplied - a file added programmatically, e.g. via the Zoho Desk API, a Deluge script, or an integration (Zoho Flow, CRM, WorkDrive).
Every attachment counts against the organization's overall storage quota, which is shared across all modules, not allocated separately per ticket or per agent.

Locating attachments

In a ticket

Ticket Attachment tab, a dedicated tab showing every file associated with that ticket, regardless of which thread or comment it came from. This is the central place to view, add, or delete a ticket's files.
  1. Conversation / email threads - files a customer included in their original or follow-up email land here automatically, attached to the specific thread they arrived in.
  2. Agent replies - an agent can attach a file directly when composing a reply, which appears both in that thread and rolls up into the Attachment tab.
  3. Private comments - agents (and sometimes contacts, if the portal allows it) can attach files to internal/private comments, visible only to agents, not to the customer.

Help center

  1. New ticket submission form - customers can attach files when first submitting a request through the Help Center, ASAP widget, or a web-to-ticket form.
  2. Customer replies in the portal - a contact replying to their own ticket through the Help Center (rather than by email) can attach files the same way an agent can.

Knowledge base

  1. Article attachments - files attached directly to a KB article (manuals, installers, spec sheets) so end users can download them alongside reading the article content.
  2. Embedded images - images placed inline in the article body (via the rich-text editor) are technically attachments too, just rendered inline rather than as a downloadable link.
  1. Inbound email attachments - anything a customer attaches to an email sent to your support address becomes a ticket attachment automatically, provided it's under the size limit.
  2. Email Templates - admins can attach a fixed file to a template (e.g. a terms-of-service PDF) so it's automatically included every time that template is used.
  3. Agent Signatures - agents can embed an image (e.g. a company logo) in their signature, which then appears on every outgoing reply.

Modules

  1. Contacts / Accounts - files can be attached directly to a contact or account record (e.g. a signed contract, a reference document) independent of any specific ticket.
  2. Tasks / Activities - files can be attached to a task associated with a ticket.
  3. Community posts (if the Community module is enabled) - users can attach files to community questions/posts.
  4. Chat and IM channels - if live chat or messaging channels are enabled, files shared during a chat session are captured as attachments on the resulting ticket.

Programmatic / Integration-based

  1. Zoho Desk API - attachments can be uploaded, listed, downloaded, and deleted via the Attachments API, independent of the web interface (useful for scripts that bulk-import historical tickets, for example).
  2. Deluge functions - a function can fetch a ticket's existing attachments and re-use them (e.g. to forward them along with an outbound email sent via a custom function).
  3. Third-party storage links - not technically an "attachment" in Zoho Desk's storage, but a common workaround: a link to a file hosted in Zoho WorkDrive, Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox, pasted into a comment or a custom URL field.

Extract text from images using OCR

Images attached to tickets often contain important information that support reps need to refer to or reuse while handling customer requests. For example, a customer may share a screenshot containing an IP address, account number, order number, or error message. Support reps may need to use this information to search for records, investigate problems, or share details with other teams.

When this information is only available in an image, support reps must read it from the image and type it manually. This can be time-consuming and may lead to errors such as mistyped numbers or missing characters which ultimately impact record searches, troubleshooting accuracy, and the resolution of customer requests.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) allows support reps to copy text directly from images and reuse it wherever needed. This reduces manual effort, minimizes typing errors, and makes it easier to work with information shared through ticket attachments.
Support reps can copy text from images in the Tickets module in the following places:
  1. Comment attachments
  2. Ticket form attachments
  3. Thread attachments
Notes
Note:
  1. OCR is supported only in INDC, USDC, and EUDC.
  2. Text can be extracted only from images uploaded in .jpg, .jpeg, or .png formats, and the text must be in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, or Romanian.

To enable OCR for Tickets module
  1. Navigate to Setup > Customization > General Settings > Tickets.
  2. Enable Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
  3. Click Enable in the confirmation box.

To copy text from an image
  1. Navigate to the Tickets module and open a ticket.
  2. Open an image from a thread, comment, or ticket details.
  3. Click the Extract Text () icon.
  4. Right-click the highlighted text and select either of the following:
    1. Copy: Copies the highlighted text.
    2. Select All: Selects all recognized text in the image. Click Copy to copy the entire text.