How to easily create local copies of linked graphics

wandern · 2021-02-07T19:30:47.746Z

Use case: Copy and paste a section of a web page. The copy/pasted content may include <img> tags that are translated by Obsidian to MD links pointing to the original graphic. For archival purposes, I want to have these graphics in my local repository. Is there a reasonable way to easily/programmatically download the relevant image files and convert the ![](https://...jpg) link to a link pointing to the new local file?

argentum · 2021-02-08T12:09:15.802Z

You should use Ctrl+ Shift + V to paste them into your notes.

wandern · 2021-02-08T17:06:57.025Z

It would be nice if dragging a remote graphic from the preview pane to the edit pane would create the file locally…

At any rate, if I “copy” an image from a web browser, and paste it into a typical application that supports images (Word, Pages, gimp, etc.), I get the image data.

If I paste into Obsidian, I get a URL.

Looking at the actual clipboard data, the clipboard contains a .tiff version of the copied .jpg file as well as .rtf data with the original .jpg file embedded.

However, Obsidian ignores all of this and just pastes in the clipboard contents of type ‘public.utf8-plain-text’.

It is different if the image is copied from a local app (it doesn’t have a URL associated with it); in that case, Obsidian creates an attachment image file from the image data on the clipboard, and then creates a local wikilink reference to the new attachment file.

This inconsistency in Obsidian’s behavior is arguably a bug.

wandern · 2021-02-08T17:18:21.349Z

I’ve filed this as a bug report, because in both cases the clipboard contains the actual image data, and Obsidian only pastes the image data in one of the two cases. All other MacOS applications I can test that support graphics have identical behavior in both cases.

Image paste behavior variance depending on source of copied image Bug reports

Image paste behavior variance depending on source of copied image Steps to reproduce OS: MacOS Use case 1, step 1: Copy image data from a webpage (right click on an image, choose “copy”). Use case 2, step 1: Copy image data from a local MacOS application (right click on an image, choose “copy”). Step 2 (common to both use cases): Paste the image in Obsidian. In use case 1, cmd-v pastes a MD link to the URL of the copied graphic and shift-cmd-v pastes only the URL (no MD formatting). in us…

argentum · 2021-02-08T20:38:43.950Z

You can deactivate this in the settings with Autoconvert HTML set to off.

laisan · 2021-02-09T00:08:52.793Z

Thank you! Obsidian pasting URL instead of an image has been irritating me for a while.
Ctrl + Shift + V works perfectly!

wandern · 2021-02-09T03:24:14.093Z

Thanks, @argentum. Unfortunately that doesn’t address the behavioral discrepancy in the linked bug report. It just means that cmd-v and shift-cmd-v act the same (because cmd-v doesn’t try to paste HTML-converted-to-MD).

It also means that no reference to images are pasted at all, which is the opposite of the desired behavior.

argentum · 2021-02-09T11:12:57.960Z

Given that there is a bug report to track this, I’ll move this to resolved help