When I create a report from a reference that contains a picture I get only the name of the gif or jpg. Especially for chemistry, it would be very helpful to actually display the picture, e.g. a reaction corresponding to the paper. Would that be possible? Thanks!

A possible work around for 1.5b2 would be to add images to your attached notes. These would show up in a report.

Ultimately, it would be perfect if we could cut-and-paste pictures (reactions) directly out of a pdf file.

If your PDF viewer will let you copy pictures (not all viewers do & most viewers do not on certain PDFs), then you should already be able to paste them into a note. If you cannot copy from a PDF, you'd have to use a third-party screenshot tool (the major operating systems all come with one).

I think I have figured this one out.

First, it is important to understand how Zotero's rich text notes work. They are actually written in HTML by tinyMCE, so when you stick a image into a note you are actually generating a img tag that points to the image source. So here are three different scenarios for how you could include an image and the results.

1. Drag an image from your desktop into a note. Result: the image shows in the note but does not show up in the report.

2. Drag an image from a webpage into a note. Result: image shows up in the note and in the report. Take a look at the source code and you will see this is still a live link to the web, this is not ideal.

3. Drag an image from your desktop into the middle column of your Zotero collection. In my case this created a new item called image.jpg. Double click on the image. You should see the image in your browser and see "zotero://attachment/numberstring/" in your location bar. Drag the image from your browser into your note. You should see the image in your note and see the image in your report. If you look at the source code for your report you should see the img link to the local copy of your image in the Zotero directory, "zotero://attachment/numberstring/".

This might work slightly different on different operating systems so if folks want to test it and report back that would probably be useful.

Thanks, Tjowens! It's a bit lengthy but it works :-) BTW, congratulations on Zotero, very fine tool!
In my case (Vista, Adobe Acrobat Reader), I couldn't capture pictures from the pdf (the screengrab add-in didn't work). Finally, I found the nifty "snipping tool" under "Accessories". Works great!

ahh ..i figured it out myself... Just click on html button in Note Editor and the entire note code appears there. Replace all the occurrences of /temp directory in some external editor and update the note with a new version of the text..!!

Still I think it would be great if zotero would put pasted images in the note folder automatically.

1.5b2 jumped straight to 2.0b3. You can think of them as being pretty much continuous. All the same features are available.

@ Tjowens Apr 15th 2009

(Mac OS X 10.5) The method 3 works.

I have also tried to have an image not only as the top-level item, but to make it a sub-item of this parent item, or of a different one. It worked. However I find the technique too cumbersome.

Better would be IMHO:

If you put an image into a note from clipboard, or by dragging an image from a web page, or by drag-n-drop of a local file containing image - an separate file is created within the bibliographic item: either a file copy (like as is the case with PDFs from local file system or from the Web), or a new PNG/JPG. The rest would be the same as now.