Export notes including image

Hi. Am I missing something - when exporting a note item via (Right-click->Export note; ) Zotero offers Markdown, HTML and RDF. Images that have been pasted in the notes are not exported, however. One does find a reference where these may be found in e.g. the RDF (e.g. "data-attachment-key="DD2ZIBAX""), but ...
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  • In what format are you expecting them?

    For Markdown and HTML, as least as long as we're exporting a single file (and inherently for Quick Copy), the main option would be to embed them as Base64-encoded strings, but that would create a much larger file, and depending on how your Markdown editor handles it, you might see huge strings of gibberish in the middle of your theoretically user-editable document. But at least some Markdown editors apparently can handle that. For an export, there could be an option to include images as separate files along with the exported .md/.html file.

    For Zotero RDF export, they should be exported as attachments and reimported properly, but that doesn't work yet. (Official embedded-image support is new in Zotero 6.)
  • edited May 2, 2022
    All three available export formats (Markdown, HTML, RDF) lead to the same "missing", so no image in the file or linked.
    I had 6.0.5 running, but updated -> same result.
    Speculating on a solution: but could it not be - knowing that the image is "there", i.e. in this case in folder .\55BVE6CG as per HTML/RDF, the folders root is not referenced correctly: where does "data-attachment-key" point to? BTW. No embedding at all in the Markdown-file, just an \image tag...
    Cheers
  • I think you misunderstood my message? None of the things I mentioned are actually implemented. I'm just pointing out that there aren't clear options, which is why this hasn't happened yet.
  • Ah :--) / So no-can-do-yet!?
    When you export an item (sic!) using e.g. Zotero RDF and the translator option is set to allow "Export files", the attached PDF is exported to some folder relative to the citation. Doing the same for a note, however, does not attach anything. Not sure if this is how things work - but having played around while delving deeper into this query: isn't the image that is part of the note just-not-another "attachment"? It does seem to reside in some Zotero-like-attachment folder, e.g. .\55BVE6CG, although we can't access it by the usual right-click->Show file, rather it's in the RDF or HTML code of the exported note (I did believe previously that the images etc. actually reside in the database, with the rest of the note!?). If it is just-another-attachment, couldn't (the couldn't here coming from someone not doing the programming, so no offense...) the image be treated like the exported item -> put it in a folder relative to the Markdown, HTML, RDF note output and reference it there (that would work for most Markdown editors, because they usually pull images relative to the *.md file anyway; and most browsers for the HTML output)?
    Cheers
  • edited January 10, 2023
    I did a bit of digging but did not come across a more recent question addressing this topic. I have a large note I've developed with a dozen images and had been planning to export as a PDF. No problem if I can save out html or markdown and then export to PDF in another app. But since images aren't currently included (and I haven't found a PDF export in Zotero) I can't easily share my note with my research advisor.

    I second the suggestion to export the html/markdown file in a folder with images. Similar to how a website would be downloaded using wget or how Jupyter Notebook markdown export saves a zip with markdown/images bundled.

    It's a fairly common way of handling html and markdown export with images. And what a barebones markdown editing app would expect to work with if the files were to be edited further outside Zotero (like then exporting as PDF or Word for example).
  • edited January 10, 2023
    @jokingspace: If all you want is a PDF, you can just copy and paste into Word or similar and generate the PDF from there.

    (You can also use the Add Note button in the word processor plugins to add the note to your document with active Zotero citations.)
  • @dstillman: Thanks for the tip; wasn't expecting it to copy everything but everything showed up fine in Word.

    Regarding the Zotero note export feature specifically, might it be possible soon to include images as separate files along with the exported .md/.html file as you mentioned in your first response?
  • My workflow is drag & drop annotations from the left or right pane of Zotero into odsidian.md notes. For a proper transfer of images from Zotero to Obsidian i have to do copy & paste (right click). That works and the image is embedded as png in an Obsidian note. Fine so far!

    But, if i drag & drop images from zotero to obsidian.md it results in endless markdown code - as @dstillman explained above.

    My wish, if technically possible, is transfering images (png) via drag & drop too. The advantage would be, i do have an automatically created backlink from any image in Obsidian to it's origin in Zotero.
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