This IPython notebook extension allows dragging&dropping images from the desktop or other programs into a notebook. A new markdown cell is created below the currently selected cell and the image is embedded. The notebook has been tested with Firefox and Chrome.

A demo video showing drag&drop of images is here: http://youtu.be/buAL1bTZ73c

Installation

Copy the contents of the dragdrop directory to a new /nbextensions/usability/dragdrop directory of your user's IPython directory, or from IPython simply call

import IPython
IPython.html.nbextensions.install_nbextension('https://raw.github.com/ipython-contrib/IPython-notebook-extensions/master/nbextensions/usability/dragdrop/main.js')

Then load the extension from within the IPython notebook:

%%javascript
IPython.load_extensions('usability/dragdrop/main');

Or, for permanent installation instructions, please see the readme, or the wiki.

Internals

The image will be uploaded to the server into the directory where your notebook resides. This means, the image is not copied into the notebook itself, it will only be linked to. The markdown cell in the notebook will contain this tag:

<img  src="http://127.0.0.1:8888/notebooks/myimage.png"/>

If you run nbconvert to generate a HTML file, this image will remain outside of the html file. You can embedd all images by calling nbconvert with the option --post=embed.EmbedPostProcessor. The file embed.py, located in the same directory of this extension needs to be in PYTHONPATH to be found.