Feature Request: Edit the Inserted Picture

One can insert pictures in the notebooks by taking photos in the marginnote 4 software or “drag-and-drop” from the albums of one’s devices. But one cannot edit the pictures (such as cropping or rotating) which have already been inserted to note cards.
I think the function of editing pictures in note cards could be developed.

Does anyone have comments on this issue?

I do not want to seem dismissive of your thoughts, clearly you have a need and I respect that. You did, however, ask for thoughts so here are mine, for what they are worth.

  1. I do not use images in my study sets because I’m overly conscious of the space I’m using in iCloud (I use the free plan). There are diagrams that I sometimes want in my workflow, but by the time I need them, I’m working in Obsidian or some other tool and I try to improve on them by recreating them in OmniGraffle, Affinity Designer, or tools like that. Bitmaps (or photos) I almost never use.

  2. If I did have a need to crop, rotate, etc. then because I’m usually not in MN, I use Preview to do such things as I’m familiar with that tool. I use a screenshot utility called CleanShot X which has pretty robust editing tools built into it as well when I need to capture the screen.

  3. When you use the term “albums” I think you might be referring to the Photos app on Macs and iOS devices. I don’t use the Mac version of Photos (I’m an amateur photographer so I have other tools I use for Photo organisation). Again, however, I’d use those tools (or the Photos app) to edit the photo before inserting it into a study set.

Those are my thoughts anyway. I know that they are likely not helpful to you but these are things that would compel me to dismiss such a feature even if it was included.

Thank you for your suggestions. You are proficient in building your workflow with multiple qualified softwares, whereas I only use MN4.
But what you are trying to argue is different from my proposal: one can have various ways to avoid inserting pictures in MN4, or edit pictures before inserting them in MN4. But the problem is that after one has inserted a picture in the note card of MN4, one can never edit the picture again. Imagine what it feels like if a LaTeX editor doesn’t allow you to modify the texts you have already inputted.
Besides, it is also not clear to me that adding some basic picture-editing tools for the note cards in MN4 (they don’t have to emulate professional photo-editing softwares) can make MN4 worse, even though many users don’t use them.

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One thing that could be done is a feature: Open in… which would allow you to open that exact instance of a picture into a simple editor. That would be a quick way to implement the feature you need. To build an editor involves a fair number of considerations. Cropping and rotating at the very least, but what about selecting regions to obscure the text in them, or painting on the image for arrows, circles, etc… Where does it end? :slight_smile:

Your use of MarginNote exclusively is where you and I differ in our methods. I use MarginNote for its effectiveness or organising text material in a way that helps me understand it. The desire that users have to make MarginNote one tool that does everything is admirable, but at such a small company I fear such hopes might be unrealistic.

I do wish I could use only one tool, but the journey from data to wisdom is a long an winding path that involves many participants, not all of them digital. That’s my thinking, anyway, and perhaps I’m investing too much in technological crutches on my learning path.

You are reasonable, and I’d like the support team to decide whether and how far MN4 should go on picture-editing.
From my own understanding, the creed of MarginNote product series is not “keep it as simple as possible”. MarginNote softwares do (almost) the best among all the softwares in creating mind map notes from documents, while encompassing comprehensive functions and tools in other aspects (taking handwritten notes, reading and editing pdf files, review deck cards, built-in browser, built-in Markdown editor, etc), though MarginNote doesn’t excel at them.
In contrast, I think some other softwares such as Notability really practice the principle “keep it as simple as possible”. The speciality of Notability is handwritten notes, so it only contains very few functions beyond that.
As for my usage of MarginNote, I don’t use almost 50% of its functions and tools at all. For example, I have never used MarginNote as a pdf editor. I use another software, Acrobat, for those purposes—I’m in the same boat with you.
However, I still think the style of MarginNote of “having its own expertise as well as a comprehensive (but not necessarily perfect) toolkit” is great: I moved from Notability to MarginNote mainly because I wanted to take mind map notes by typing instead of writing annotations on the narrow margin of the pdf files with Notability. But now I can still occasionally take handwritten annotations with MarginNote whenever I want. This is because taking handwritten annotation is also available in MarginNote. And its capability, though worse than Notability, just suffices my need.

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Honestly I want to crop and rotate my images too. No need of circles or other ps functions. Just let me crop and rotate the images I’ve taken in class of the blackboard!

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