Linux Image Loading Fix

Obsidian plugin that fixes image loading issues on Linux (Ubuntu).

Problem

On Linux, especially Ubuntu and derivatives (Pop!_OS, Linux Mint, etc.), Obsidian (an Electron/Chromium app) often fails to display local images. The issue has been reported since 2022 (v1.0.0) and remains unfixed.

The root cause is twofold:

1. Broken app:// protocol — Electron/Chromium cannot resolve paths with non-ASCII characters: emoji, diacritics, Cyrillic, CJK, etc.
2. Missing image codecs — some Linux Electron builds lack codecs for PNG, JPEG, WebP, causing status 0 or decode failures.

Affects Snap, Flatpak, and DEB packages. AppImage is slightly more stable but not immune. ARM systems also affected.

This is an upstream Electron/Chromium bug. The Obsidian team cannot fix it directly. This plugin provides a reliable workaround.

How it works

The plugin intercepts markdown rendering (MarkdownPostProcessor), finds all <img> elements, reads the image file directly from disk via vault.adapter.readBinary() and replaces src with a Blob URL (blob:...). This bypasses the broken app:// protocol.

Features

• Loads images bypassing the app:// protocol
• Supports png, jpg, gif, webp, svg, bmp
• Automatic processing when opening a page

Installation

Symlink (recommended for development)

ln -s "$PWD" /home/death/Documents/TEST-VAULT-3/.obsidian/plugins/linux-image-rendering-fix

After npm run build, Obsidian picks up the new main.js on plugin reload.

Copy files

Copy main.js, manifest.json, styles.css to the plugin directory:

<Vault>/.obsidian/plugins/linux-image-rendering-fix/

Issues

Bug reports and feature requests: https://github.com/Evgene-Kopylov/linux-image-rendering-fix/issues

Development

Development happens on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/Evgene-Kopylov/linux-image-rendering-fix

npm install
npm run dev    # watch mode
npm run build  # production build
npm run lint   # ESLint
npm run test   # Vitest

License

LGPL-3.0