Images and files

Drop a picture, a recording or a document into a note, and find it again by what's inside it.

Drag a file onto a note, paste it, or pick Image, audio or file from the toolbar or the / menu.

What is accepted

Pictures as PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, AVIF and HEIC. Audio as MP3, M4A, WAV, OGG, FLAC and AIFF. Video as MP4, MOV and WebM. Documents as PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF, Markdown, text, CSV, JSON and ZIP.

Anything else is refused, and the message tells you what's accepted. SVG and HTML are left out on purpose, because both can carry a script.

Pictures up to 10 MB, or 40 MB for a JPEG, which is made lighter on the way in. Audio and documents up to 100 MB, video up to 500 MB, and 10 GB across everything.

Pictures

A picture lands in the note at a readable size, and dragging its corner resizes it. A photo from an iPhone arrives as a HEIC and is shown as a JPEG, with the original kept. Download it from Attachments in the rail and you get the HEIC exactly as your phone took it.

The printed text in a picture is read too, so a screenshot of an error message turns up when you search for its wording. See What is searchable.

Recordings, video and everything else

Audio and video play in the note. Everything else, a PDF included, sits as a row with the filename, its size, and a download button.

A PDF gets its pages below the row as well; see Reading and marking up a PDF.

Paste a YouTube or Vimeo address on a line of its own and it becomes a player in the note, and so do Spotify, Figma, Google Maps and a few more. Any other link becomes a card with the page's title and picture. See Links, cards and players.

What is searchable

The words inside an attached PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Markdown, text, CSV or JSON file are searchable, so a phrase in a document finds the note it's attached to.

So are the words in your pictures. Scratchpad reads the printed text in a screenshot, a photo of a page, a receipt, or a slide, in English and French, and a search for any of it finds the note the picture is in. A scanned PDF, whose pages are pictures of paper, is read the same way, up to its first 200 pages. It happens on our own servers, and the picture never goes to another company. A locked note's pictures are left alone, like its files.

It reads best what looks like a page or a screen: dark type on a plain, light background, or light type on a dark one. Some things it doesn't read well, or at all:

• words laid over a photograph, like a poster or a caption on a holiday picture
• handwriting
• small, blurry, or sharply angled text in a phone photo
• languages other than English and French

A picture is read the first time you search after adding it, so a new one can take a search or two to turn up.

The assistant can read those words too, so you can ask it what a receipt came to or what a slide said.

What travels with the note

A share link carries the files, so whoever you send it to sees them. So does Download everything in Settings, under Your data, which is a zip of your notes plus the attachments themselves.

Export a single note, or everything as Markdown, and you get the words and a link to each file rather than the file.

Where they all are

Attachments in the rail lists the files in your notes, the most recently edited note first, with the note each one belongs to. Filters along the top narrow it to pictures, recordings, video or documents.

Files in locked notes and in the trash are left out, on the same reasoning as search: a filename is a fair description of what a private note is about.

Last updated 1 October 2026