Images

Adding an image

In the desktop editor, either:

• Drag an image file into the editor, or
• Paste an image from your clipboard.

MDflow uploads it and inserts the markdown image syntax for you. Upload progress is visible in both the editor and the preview.

Image upload is desktop only. Mobile readers and writers can view uploaded images, but cannot add them. This applies to the mobile web app; the iOS app also has no image support.

Supported formats and sizes

• Formats: JPEG, PNG and WebP.
• Maximum accepted size: 20 MB before processing.
• Resizing: MDflow resizes images in your browser to a maximum dimension of 1024 px before uploading. The upload is therefore much smaller than the original file, and the resizing costs you nothing in bandwidth.

Your plan sets how many images you can upload in total: 5 on Free, 10,000 on Pro.

Externally hosted images

You can also reference an image by URL with plain markdown, and it renders normally:

![A diagram](https://example.com/diagram.png)

These do not count against your image allowance, because MDflow is not storing them. The trade-off is the usual one: if the remote host goes away, so does your image.

Privacy — how uploaded images are protected

This is the part worth reading carefully, because it is easy to assume the wrong thing.

Uploaded images are private by default. An image becomes readable through a public share link only when it is referenced by the saved public document.

Three things follow:

• Uploading an image does not publish it.
• Referencing an image in a document you have not saved does not publish it.
• Referencing it in a document that is not shared does not publish it.

All three conditions must hold: saved, referenced, and the document is public.

Automatic cleanup

MDflow tidies up after you, so unused uploads do not silently accumulate against your allowance:

• Removing an image reference from a saved document cleans up the now-unused upload.
• Deleting a document or folder cleans up its uploaded images.
• Duplicating a document copies its referenced images, so the duplicate is self-contained rather than sharing files with the original.
• Cloning a shared document into your own workspace copies the images it references, so your copy is independent.

Images and encryption

Encryption and MDflow-hosted images are mutually exclusive:

• Encrypting a document removes its uploaded MDflow images first.
• Images cannot be added while a document is encrypted.

The reason is structural. Encryption happens in your browser and the server only ever stores ciphertext — but an uploaded image is a separate file the server must serve. There is no way to hold both properties at once, so MDflow chooses the guarantee it promised: the server cannot see your encrypted content.

If you need images alongside encrypted text, reference an externally hosted image by URL. The markdown link is encrypted along with the rest of the body; the image itself lives with whoever hosts it.

Export

When you export a workspace as a .zip, every referenced uploaded image is bundled into a shared assets/ folder at the archive root, and the markdown links are rewritten to relative paths — so the export renders offline. See 02 Exporting a Workspace.