Best place to store embedded images

I have a number of meal recipes, one per note, in my Vault. Each recipe had a link to an online image showing the meal. Opening some of the notes on my iPad resulted in Obsidian hanging trying to find the images. So I downloaded all of the images and put them into a Media folder below my Recipes folder, then dragged each one into the appropriate note. So each note has something like the following, a couple of lines below the title.

![[Baked Eggs.jpg]]

My vault is in my iCloud folder and, so far, everything has synced properly from my MacBook to my iPad and my iPhone. Except this folder of images.

At the moment, in each Recipe file on the iPad and iPhone, I see something like “Baked Eggs.jpg is not created yet. Click to create.” and not the expected embed code, and I don’t know why.

On the Mac, each of the images in the Media folder currently shows a cloud icon. Will these images eventually sync to my other devices? Is it OK to keep them in the Media subfolder immediately under my Recipes folder? Is there somewhere better to keep them?

What I’m trying to do

Embed images into notes in my vault that’s in my iCloud folder.

Things I have tried

My search for ‘embedded images’ didn’t return anything helpful.

I don’t think it’s going to matter where in your vault you put them. iCloud isn’t aware of your vault structure.

If you see the little cloud by your files in MacOS, that means they are offloaded to the cloud. You might have to go to System Preferences → Apple ID → iCloud → uncheck “Optimize Mac Storage”. That should fix the problem on your Mac at least.

But I don’t personally know of any equivalent setting in iOS or iPadOS.

(In this thread, it sounds like it took a long time for iCloud to download stuff after the Optimize option was turned off. All Content from Vault disappeared)


That makes sense. You don’t have an Obsidian problem. You have an iCloud problem. If you search for iCloud, there are a few more threads on the topic that might help.

Thanks for your reply. I never have “Optimize Mac Storage” on. I solved the problem by logging out of iCloud and back in again. Something was stopping certain things from being synced but now it is all OK.

If I create or edit a lot of new notes on one device, I now use the Files app to force download the new versions onto the other devices. That way Obsidian finds the changes straight away and I don’t have to wait while it waits for the sync to complete.

Sorry for the delay in replying. I also asked in Reddit/r/Obsidian and forgot that I’d done so here as well.

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