I’m eager to migrate from Evernote to Joplin, and so far 95% of the migration process has been dang near perfect. But the one showstopper for me is that it appears that Joplin does not support nondestructive image annotation, which is a huge deal for me because I do a lot of documentation and logging of support tickets and being able to paste in a screenshot into a note from the system clipboard, and then right-clicking on it to quickly add visual annotations to the image (e.g. arrows, highlighted text, shapes, etc) is one of Evernote’s best features.
I’ve tried to even vaguely replicate this functionality in Joplin (currently using 3.4.12) via the Freehand Drawing plugin and Excalidraw V2 plugin, respectively. Freehand Drawing is a non-starter because it’s not non-destructive. Once I draw an arrow on an image, it’s baked in and cant be changed.
I then disabled the Freehand Drawing plugin, and tried joplin-excalidraw-v2, which I had high hopes for, because when I was testing Obsidian, Excalidraw worked great for cross platform, non-destructive image annotation. But in Joplin, when i import an image into the Excalidraw canvas, then do some annotations on it, the imported image is lost when I click Save, leaving only the annotations.
Is there something inherent to the design of Joplin that makes it difficult to implement a feature like this? It’s really the biggest hurdle for me to get over in my desire to remove Evernote from my life, and it’s surprising that there seems to be no way to do this in Joplin?
I think the annotations actually are none destructive. For example, you can draw something on an image, save, then open it again in Joplin and use the eraser to remove annotations, section at a time. You can take the svg file from Joplin and extract the image out manually, but there is just not a simple way to remove all annotations at once in the Joplin UI.
I have also been looking for a way to annotate images - this is very interesting and exiting to heat. II just played with the drawing plugin and indeed you are correct that I am able to re-edit it after it is done.
One thing I can’t figure out is how to easily annotate an existing pasted in image in an old note (like I just did a screen capture from my screen and pasted it into a note and later on I want to add annotations).
The only way I found was to right click on the existing image and select “copy image” and then use the “insert image” icon to start a new blank image where I can then paste my old image into a new object and add annotations there. After I exit I now have my original image as well as my new item with the image and the annotations. So then I delete my original image to only have the new annotated one (which I can go back and edit).
Is there a shorter way to do this that I am missing?
My idea of “non-destructive annotation” is being able to edit the image and modify any aspect of the annotations you’ve added to that image. For example, if I draw an arrow to point at a control on a UI screenshot, or outline an area using a box, I want to be able to change those annotations later on, if necessary.
Unless I’m doing it wrong, the only thing I can get to be “non-destructive” in the Freehand Drawing plugin is text. I can modify the text and reposition it, which is great. But it seems that if i draw an arrow or callout box on the same image, those annotations are “baked in” as far as modifying their position or attributes. The only thing i can seem to do is delete the whole object using the Eraser tool. I cant reposition the element or change any other attribute about them.
But it seems that if i draw an arrow or callout box on the same image, those annotations are “baked in” as far as modifying their position or attributes. The only thing i can seem to do is delete the whole object using the Eraser tool. I cant reposition the element or change any other attribute about them
Yeah you can do that. Just click the rectangle icon and then you can click on a drawn section to move and resize it. Also if you move the section once selected, that will bring it to the top.
It would be much more intuitive, however, if you could select annotation objects by clicking directly on them. But I can live with that odd usability quirk, as long as there’s a way to move stuff around after the fact.
