Images

Images live next to your document on disk and render inline, without ever fetching anything from the network.

Adding an image

Paste, drag-and-drop, or use the toolbar's image button to insert one while editing. Context Raven saves the file next to your document, in a <note-name>.assets/ folder, and inserts a relative link to it — so the document and its images stay portable together if you move the folder.

Pasted or dropped screenshots are compressed automatically (to WebP, JPEG, or PNG) when that makes them smaller: the longest edge is capped at 2560 px and GPS metadata is stripped. An image is never upscaled. An image added through the toolbar's file picker is saved as-is, uncompressed.

Supported formats: PNG, JPG/JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP, AVIF, SVG, and ICO.

Viewing

Click a resolved image, or press Enter or Space while it's focused, to open it in a zoom-and-pan lightbox — the same one used for Mermaid diagrams. Opening it doesn't shift the surrounding layout. A corner Expand button does the same thing: it appears in the image's top-right corner when you hover it or focus it, while reading and while editing (on a touch screen it's always shown). Very small images (under roughly 100 × 66 px as displayed, so a narrow window can hide it on a wide picture) don't get the button; clicking the image itself still opens the lightbox.

Staying in sync

If an image file is added from outside the app while the document is open, it appears live. If an existing image is edited in place under the same filename, the open document keeps showing the old bytes until you reopen it — this applies to a standalone file too, which never gets a live image update while open.

Limits

Remote image URLs are never fetched. They stay as an inert placeholder everywhere — while editing, while reading, and in a shared link — the one exception is export, which does fetch remote images once, at the moment you export; see Export.
An image path pointing outside the document's folder, or outside a tracked root, is refused.
An animated image (such as an animated GIF) shows only its first frame in an export.

Renaming and moving

Renaming the document also renames its <name>.assets/ folder and rewrites every image reference inside it in one operation. See Reading and editing for how renaming works.