Image Gin for Obsidian

Write an image_prompt in your note's frontmatter and get a matched set of banner, portrait, and square images in your own house style. Then decide, image by image, where every picture in your vault lives: on your disk, on your own CDN, or on a public host.

Image Gin brings AI image generation (Recraft and Ideogram), stock-image search, and CDN hosting into Obsidian, and puts a checkpoint in front of every image you drag or paste into a note.

New in 0.3.0: Recraft V4.1, house styles you build from images already in your vault, a fully searchable settings tab, and ImageKit folders that roll over by month. Requires Obsidian 1.13 or later. Release notes →

• Why Image Gin?
• Features
• Install
• Configuration
• Usage
• Releases
• Development

Why Image Gin?

If you publish from Obsidian, every note wants share images: an OpenGraph banner, a tall card for iMessage and WhatsApp, a square for social. Generating them is easy now. Generating them so a whole site looks like one illustrator drew it is not, and neither is keeping track of where all those images end up.

Image Gin handles both halves:

• Make images that belong together. One prompt, every size you need, all in a style you define once.
• Control where images go. Client screenshots stay on your disk. Images that need a URL go to your own private CDN. Only what you choose goes anywhere public.

✨ Features

Generate images from your notes

• Two providers.
  • Recraft, including V4.1, Pro (2K), Flash ($0.007 an image), Vector (editable SVG), V4 Styles, and V3, for illustration in a consistent house style.
  • Ideogram v3, for per-call style controls and accurate in-image text, with optional Layerize-Text cleanup.
• Every size at once. Banner, portrait, square, plus any custom size you add (for example a tall banner_image_taller for messaging apps). Paths are written back to frontmatter, one key per size.
• Prompts live in frontmatter (image_prompt), so they travel with the note and can be revised and rerun.

Keep every image in one house style

• Recraft styles from your own images. Point Image Gin at 2–10 images you like (files in your vault work; no hosting needed), click Create style, and every later image follows that style's technique, colors, and texture.
• Brand colors and background color keep the palette steady.
• One shared seed per run, so a banner, portrait, and square from the same prompt come out as a family.
• Ideogram brand template. A brand-wide prefix, suffix, and negative prompt wrap every prompt, with a {prompt} token for mid-sentence insertion.

Decide where every image goes (Drop Gate)

• Every image you drag or paste into a note asks first. It can be saved as a vault attachment (private, on your disk), uploaded to your own ImageKit CDN, or sent to anonymous Imgur for genuinely shareable images.
• Confirm every image, or only while an external destination (ImageKit or Imgur) is enabled; with neither enabled, images save to the vault as Obsidian normally does. Optionally remember your choice for the rest of the session.

Host and convert

• Convert a note's local images to ImageKit URLs in one command: frontmatter images, including custom sizes, plus ![[embeds]] in the body. Or batch-convert a whole folder.
• Dated upload folders. /images/{YYYY}-{MM} files each upload under its own month.
• Optional WebP conversion and local-file cleanup after upload.

Search stock images

• Magnific (formerly Freepik) search, inserting results straight into your note.
• A local image cache for external images: works around Obsidian's content security policy, enables offline viewing, and cleans itself up.

Commands

1. Generate images for current file (Recraft): from the note's image_prompt, in your configured style, for the sizes you pick.

2. Generate images (Ideogram): brand-template wrapping, per-call style, speed, and magic-prompt overrides, a live preview of the exact prompt sent, and optional Layerize-Text.

3. Convert local images to remote images: upload the active note's local images to ImageKit and rewrite the links.

4. Batch convert directory images to remote: the same, for every note in the active note's folder (body embeds).

5. Search Magnific images: search stock photos and insert them at the cursor.

6. Drop gate: reset session-remembered destination: forget the destination you chose to remember for this session.

🚀 Install

Requires Obsidian 1.13 or later (desktop only).

In Obsidian: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search "Image Gin" → Install → Enable.

Prefer to install by hand? Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release into <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/image-gin/. Every release asset is cryptographically attested to the commit and workflow that built it. Verify before enabling:

gh attestation verify main.js --repo lossless-group/image-gin

🛠️ Configuration

Each integration is optional and independent. Enable only what you use. Every setting is searchable from Obsidian's settings search box.

The ImageKit upload folder accepts {YYYY}, {MM}, and {DD}, filled in with the upload date. For example, /images/{YYYY}-{MM}.

Settings as of 0.2.x. In 0.3.0 the same settings are grouped into searchable sections.

🖼️ Usage

Open the command palette (Cmd/Ctrl+P) and type Image Gin. Generation commands read the active note's image_prompt; if the key doesn't exist yet, Image Gin creates it so you can see where it goes.

Keeping every image in one house style (Recraft)

Recraft calls a reusable look a style. It's built from 1–10 example images, stored in your Recraft account, and referenced by ID. You never have to upload anything on Recraft's website.

1. Pick your examples. Choose 2–10 images that have the look you want: your own past illustrations, brand art, or images from any other generator. They can be files already in your vault.
2. In Settings → Image Gin, set Model to V4 Styles (or any V4.1 model).
3. List the images in Style reference URLs, one per line. Use a vault path (Visuals/old-banner.jpg), a pasted embed (![[old-banner.jpg]]), or a public URL.
4. Click Create style (costs $0.005, once). Image Gin fills in Custom style ID for you.
5. Generate as usual. Every image now follows the style.

Good to know:

• A style only works with the model it was created for. If you switch models, create the style again, or switch back.
• Already have a style ID? Paste it into Custom style ID and pick the model it was made with. Recraft V3 styles keep working on V3 (legacy).
• Keep your example images. If you lose the style ID, they're the recipe for rebuilding it.
• No examples yet? Leave the style empty, add Brand colors (hex codes), and keep Share one seed across sizes on. Then save your favorite results as the examples for a style.
• Recraft's website doesn't list styles created through the API. They still exist on your account.

Frontmatter contract

Image Gin reads from and writes to a small set of keys in your note's frontmatter:

Releases

0.3.0 — 2026-10-06 · requires Obsidian 1.13

• Recraft V4.1 and the full current model lineup, including V4 Styles.
• House styles: build a Recraft style from images in your vault with one click. Brand colors, background color, and one shared seed per run keep a set consistent.
• Settings rebuilt on Obsidian's declarative API. Every setting is searchable, and this fixes the Obsidian 1.14 bug that hid half the settings tab.
• ImageKit upload folders accept {YYYY}, {MM}, {DD}.
• Fixed:
  • Recraft generation freezing Obsidian
  • custom size keys (e.g. banner_image_taller) skipped by "Convert local images to remote"
  • every image saved as .png
• Full notes: changelog/releases/0.3.0.md.

0.2.3 — 2026-05-18

• Every release asset (main.js, manifest.json, styles.css) is cryptographically attested to the commit and workflow run that built it. Notes

0.2.2 — 2026-05-17

• Every image asks where it goes. A fresh build of the Drop Gate release with the marketplace-lint fixes. Notes

0.2.1 — 2026-05-10

• Obsidian review-bot lint cleanup for the community directory submission.

0.2.0 — 2026-05-09

• Drop Gate: a confirmation modal for every image dragged or pasted into a note, with vault, ImageKit, and Imgur destinations.

0.1.1 — 2026-05-03

• Ideogram v3 as a second AI generation provider.
• Brand Template prompt wrapping (prefix / suffix / base negative prompt) with bookend and {prompt}-slot-insertion modes.
• Master "All" toggle on the image-size selector, synced both ways with the individual toggles.
• Last-session UI state persistence across modal opens.
• image_prompt frontmatter key auto-created on modal open.
• Live resolved-prompt preview in the Ideogram modal.

0.1.0 — 2026-05-03

• Marketplace-readiness pass:
  • ESLint flat config wired into the build
  • no any
  • Obsidian DOM API instead of innerHTML
  • a persistent FileLogger
  • Obsidian's metadataCache + processFrontMatter instead of a hand-rolled YAML parser

0.0.9 — 2025-09-14

• Batch convert local images across a folder to ImageKit URLs.

🧑‍💻 Development

Requires Node.js 22 and pnpm.

git clone https://github.com/lossless-group/image-gin.git
cd image-gin
pnpm install
pnpm dev      # esbuild watch: rebuilds main.js and styles.css on change
pnpm test     # 54 tests via Node's built-in runner; no API calls, no credits spent
pnpm build    # ESLint (Obsidian's review-bot rules) + tsc + production bundle

To use your working copy in a vault, symlink it into the vault's plugins folder. The folder name must be the plugin id, image-gin:

ln -s /path/to/image-gin /path/to/your-vault/.obsidian/plugins/image-gin

Then run pnpm dev. Reload the plugin to pick up new builds: toggle it off and on in Community plugins, or quit and reopen Obsidian.

Releasing. Bump manifest.json, package.json, and versions.json together (three-part semver), write changelog/releases/<version>.md, and push a tag with no v prefix (for example 0.3.0). .github/workflows/release.yml then builds, attests, and publishes the release with those notes.

Image Gin is part of The Lossless Group's plugin family, with Cite Wide, Perplexed, and Metafetch. Each one installs and works on its own.

📝 License

Open source under The Unlicense. If Image Gin saves you time, buy us a coffee.