Steps to reproduce: Go to this URL https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372533503/figure/fig1/AS:11431281270911835@1723283890520/Carotid-sinus-and-carotid-body-The-carotid-sinus-nerve-a-branch-of-the-glossopharyngeal.jpg Copy the image Paste that to Anki. Notice the 403 error and the resulting image. src attribute pointing to remote URL, rather than downloading the media. [image] [image] Gonna make a PR for this. Leaving this post as a reminder.

See Revert "Prefer image pastes over HTML in the editor (#2856)" · ankitects/anki@174a2e7 · GitHub [image] trgk: Notice the 403 error Are you on a vpn?

Oh, this had already been discussed. No, I’m not behind any VPN. It seems like some sites don’t like Anki’s user agent or so.

This thread is also related: [image] Pasting image from clipboard seems to download the image anyway Help I’m on Linux, gnome with x11 and when I add images to notes, I often just click on copy image in Chrome, and paste to anki. [image] However, I have been noticing Anki freezing for short or long time (seconds) after I paste each image which shouldn’t happen if it’s pasted from the clipboard locally. Moreover, I occasionally got popups of 4xx errors after the freeze (but the image seems to paste successfully anyways. I didn’t bother to inspect the field html when those happened but I suspect A…

Fix copied image not imported locally on 403 error. main ← phu54321:fix/chrome_image_paste_403 opened 11:19AM - 10 Jun 25 UTC (UTC) [image] phu54321 +45 -0 This PR fixes issues described [here](https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/pasting-some-…image-from-chrome-wont-import-the-image-to-the-media-database/62457). Maybe a partial reimplementation of https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/abd8759d502bea5707661d17b06787e395794156 ## Problem description When you copy images on browser, with the image, a html snippet is also copied. ```html ``` If user tries to paste this to Anki, since HTML handler kicks in ahead of the image handler. When Anki sees ` `, it tries to download that image, but due to user-agent or other unknown issues it fails with 403 forbidden error. So URL pointing to remote resource persists. ![image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/072f062a-726b-4fc4-9117-dfb03beac9e8) ![image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d1583bf2-593c-4e30-bd3c-5fa807989e5f) ## Bug reproduction step 1. With Chrome browser, go to [this image](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372533503/figure/fig1/AS:11431281270911835@1723283890520/Carotid-sinus-and-carotid-body-The-carotid-sinus-nerve-a-branch-of-the-glossopharyngeal.jpg) and copy the image. 3. Paste the image to the Anki. 4. Notice `403` forbidden error and image referenced remotely. ![image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/072f062a-726b-4fc4-9117-dfb03beac9e8) ![image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d1583bf2-593c-4e30-bd3c-5fa807989e5f) ## Suggested solution When Anki detects a single image paste, - First, try to download the image. If it works, use that. (preserving attributes like `alt`). I tried to make this procedure as backward-compliant as possible. - If downloading fails, use the image in the clipboard. This drops other attributes like `alt` as I tried to use existing function `EditorWebView._processImage`. Since download failure rarely happens, I hope this won't make much of the trouble. Posted a quick PR draft. This pr conserves filename and alt when the download succeeds.

For record, I think anki should download the original image whenever possible instead of using the clipboard data, as it would allow… Animated GIF Image with transparency (may not be respected on the clipboard) Lossless embedding of non-jpg images.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/934503660 Created an addon for the issue. Likely the PR won’t be merged cause Anki’s undergoing some serious redesign on the card editor.

You might want to insert the image as a reference to keep an image up-to-date. But this shouldn’t be default behavior, so I agree with you. I’m not well into this particular issue, but perhaps the insert-as-reference is already a fallback when image download isn’t working? After all, it’s strange that an error 403 is shown before then displaying the correct image. Maybe a different user agent is used when trying to download the image versus when displaying it for the user? On other images, my Anki just runs into unhandled exceptions.

Maybe a different user agent is used when trying to download the image versus when displaying it for the user? I think so. Anki uses Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Anki) as a user agent when retrieving a URL, without any referer or so.

Pasting some image from Chrome won't import the image to the media database

Anki Development

vaibhav June 10, 2025, 11:19am 4

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Pasting some image from Chrome won't import the image to the media database

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