Image Glance

Image Glance keeps selected images from interrupting the flow of a note. Only images marked with glance become compact inline thumbnails; all other images keep Obsidian's normal rendering.

It is designed for notes where a picture is useful context, but a full-size embed would break the sentence or paragraph you are writing.

Features

• Opt-in compact thumbnails in Reading view and Live Preview.
• Normal Obsidian image embeds stay untouched unless you mark them with glance.
• Hover preview on desktop, with optional tap preview on mobile.
• Click isolation for marked thumbnails, so accidental clicks do not trigger Obsidian's native image resize behavior.
• Configurable thumbnail size, preview bounds, and corner radius.
• No network requests, telemetry, vault scanning, or Markdown modification.

Usage

For a wiki image embed, add |glance:

Text before ![[image.png|glance]] text after.

For a standard Markdown image, use glance as the alt text:

Text before ![glance](image.png) text after.

An optional description can appear before the marker:

![Diagram description|glance](diagram.png)

Unmarked images remain unchanged:

![[image.png]]
![Normal image](image.png)

To keep a thumbnail directly after text, put the image embed on the same Markdown line as that text.

Manual installation

Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest GitHub release, then place them in:

<your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/image-glance/

Reload Obsidian and enable Image Glance under Community plugins.

Development

npm install
npm run dev

For a production build:

npm run build

Do development in a test vault rather than your main vault.

Release

Releases are built by GitHub Actions. To publish a new version:

1. Update version in manifest.json and package.json.
2. Add the version to versions.json if the minimum Obsidian version changes.
3. Run npm run build.
4. Commit the changes.
5. Push a tag that exactly matches the manifest version, such as 0.2.2.

The release workflow uploads main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css.

License

MIT