Images
A Markdown image reference alone on its own line renders as the picture. The fastest way to get one there is to paste it.
Paste an image
Copy an image anywhere, a screenshot or a picture from the web, and press ⌘V in a note. Ledge saves the image into the workspace and inserts the reference:
Ledge embeds only when the pasteboard holds an image and no text. A pasteboard holding text pastes as text, converted from formatting where there is any (Notes and Workspaces).
The file lands in .ledge-assets/ inside the workspace folder, named by paste date. One folder holds a workspace's images wherever the note that pasted them sits, so two notes can show the same picture. An attached project folder carries its pasted images with it, and the references stay relative. The folder is dot-prefixed so that Ledge's writes are identifiable inside a real project.
A reference points at the file from the note that holds it, the way Markdown references work everywhere else. A note at the top of a workspace writes .ledge-assets/pasted-2026-07-19.png; a note one folder down writes ../.ledge-assets/pasted-2026-07-19.png for the same file. Ledge writes the right one when you paste, and the note renders in any other Markdown editor too.
Insert a picture you have not copied
Run Insert Image… from the palette to pick a picture instead of pasting one. Ledge saves it and inserts the reference exactly as a paste does.
On a Mac this opens a file dialog. On a phone it opens the photo library, and the button for it sits on the bar above the keyboard: a phone has no ⌘V, so this is the way pictures get into a note there.
A picture chosen this way is saved as a JPEG when it already is one (a photograph off a camera roll stays a tenth of the size it would be as a PNG), and as a PNG otherwise. Location data is not carried over.
What renders
Two kinds of source draw as images:
- Web URLs.
loads from the network. - Workspace files.
.ledge-assets/pastes, and any image already in the workspace folder, referenced relative to the note. A note in an attached project can show the project's ownimg/logo.png, and a note in a subfolder reaches it with../img/logo.png.
Supported formats are png, jpeg, gif, webp, avif, and svg. Absolute paths stay as text. A reference that climbs out of the workspace folder draws as a broken image, the same as one naming a file that is not there.
An image renders when its reference sits alone on a line and your caret is elsewhere. Click the picture, or move the caret onto its line, and it reverts to editable Markdown; move away and it draws again. This is the same reveal-on-touch behavior as tables and links.
A selection that only passes over an image leaves it drawn, tinted to show it is included. Dragging or shift-arrowing across a picture therefore selects the text on both sides of it without the page moving under you. What decides is where the selection started: begin on the image's own line and the Markdown shows, as it does for the caret.
A reference inline in a sentence stays compact instead: the syntax is concealed and the alt text is styled like a link, so the line does not reflow while you read.
Deleting notes and images
Deleting a note leaves its images in place. A stray unused image is cheaper than an image another note still references.
Moving a note to another folder leaves them in place too, and rewrites the note's references so they still point at the same files. A locked note has to be unlocked first, because its references are inside the encrypted body.
The files are ordinary files, so you can grep them by name and sync them with the workspace.
An image pasted into a locked note is encrypted on disk from the first byte, and locking a note seals the images it references. See Note Locking.