The Picture Gallery
Drop a photo into a daily note. It auto-appears in your weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly galleries — forever, free.
Time Garden's picture system is a quietly magical part of the vault. You drop a photo into a daily note. It appears in your weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly galleries — automatically, forever.
How To Add A Picture
On any daily note, find the section labeled 📁 Pictures.
Drag any image file from your desktop, file explorer, or screenshot tool directly into that section. Obsidian saves the file into your vault and embeds it on the page.
You can also paste images:
- Mac: copy an image (e.g., screenshot with
Shift + Cmd + 4), click into the Pictures section, andCmd + V - Windows / Linux: same idea with
Ctrl + V
That's the entire workflow. No tagging, no folder picking, no naming required.
Where Photos Live On Disk
By default, Obsidian stores images in 07 Notes/Images/ (configurable in Obsidian Settings → Files & Links → Default location for new attachments).
The actual image is just a regular file. Move it, back it up, or open it in Photoshop — it's a normal .png/.jpg/.heic like any other.
How Aggregation Works
Time Garden uses an Image Retriever component on each higher layer:
| Layer | Pulls from |
|---|---|
| Weekly note | All 7 dailies of the week |
| Monthly note | All weeks of the month |
| Quarterly note | All months of the quarter |
| Yearly note | All quarters (which transitively pull everything) |
So one photo on April 27th shows up on:
- The April 27 daily note
- The Week 17 weekly note
- The April monthly note
- The Q2 2026 quarterly note
- The 2026 yearly note
You did none of this manually. The Image Retrievers ran the queries on each note when you opened it.
Why Galleries Look Beautiful
The CSS classes image-borders and image-small (applied to every Time Garden note via the parent template) round corners, add a soft border, and shrink images to a thumbnail-friendly size in galleries. It's subtle, but it makes a wall of 30 photos feel curated rather than dumped.
You can tweak these in Understanding the CSS-Snippets if you want them bigger / smaller / un-rounded.
Tips For Photo-Heavy Journaling
One photo a day = a yearly photo book.
If you drop one image per daily note, your yearly gallery becomes a 365-photo retrospective. That alone is worth the journaling habit.
Sync warning.
If you're using iCloud / Dropbox / OneDrive to sync your vault, large image-heavy vaults can get slow. See Syncing Time Garden Between Devices for the recommended sync strategies and what to exclude.
Custom Section Markers
Time Garden uses two hidden markers to know where the Pictures section starts and ends:
### 📁 Pictures ← visible
... (your images)
### <p hidden>PicturesEnd</p> ← hidden markerDon't delete these. The Image Retrievers on weekly+ notes use these markers to know exactly which images to grab. (If you accidentally delete one, just type it back exactly as shown.)
Videos and GIFs
You can drag in .mp4, .webm, .mov, and .gif files too — they'll embed and play inline. They get aggregated the same way. Just keep in mind that GIFs can be huge; consider compressing them before embedding.
Up Next
- Daily Notes — where pictures get dropped in
- Yearly Notes — where the full annual gallery comes together
- Understanding the CSS-Snippets — tweaking how images look
Quick Notes — Highlights, Ideas, Progress
Highlights, Ideas, and Progress — the three quick-tap categories in Time Garden that auto-aggregate up through every layer.
The Wheel of Life
The Wheel of Life is Time Garden’s eight-dimension life snapshot, tracked weekly, that reveals patterns across months and years.