Viewing images in Joplin possible solution

I was an Evernote customer for more than a decade until they quadrupled their pricing.

I tested Joplin and obsidian and some others and couldn’t settle on just one. I pay for Joplin hosting and sync and I also pay for obsidian sync.

I use each app for its specific strengths. For a very reasonable price I can host my database on Joplin cloud and publish notes to the internet and obsidian can’t do that without paying a lot of money or using a free extension.

My recommendations for you.

Obsidian stores all of its data in regular directories with markdown files in them.

You can use the Joplin CLI  in a terminal window to export your entire Joplin database into markdown format and have it go to a location that you will use as an obsidian vault. Basically just a directory tree. There are sample instructions below.

Use Joplin as the master note taking app as you probably are now.

Also install Obsidian which may be a better picture viewer for you. I don’t know for sure.

Do all your editing in Joplin.

Once a week (or whenever convenient), export everything as Markdown.

Replace or update your Obsidian vault with the exported files.

Use Obsidian mainly for viewing, graphing, backlinks, plugins, etc.

Pros

Very reliable.

No merge conflicts.

Joplin remains your authoritative source.

There are a few approaches:

Joplin CLI (my favorite)

• The terminal version of Joplin can open your existing desktop profile and export everything to Markdown or HTML.
• It understands notebooks, tags, resources, and metadata, so you don’t have to decode the SQLite schema yourself.

You can even script it, for example:

joplin export ~/ObsidianVault --format md

joplin export ~/ObsidianVault --format md

Then run that from a scheduled task or cron job.

If I were building your workflow

I’d write (or find) a small script that:

• launches the Joplin CLI,
• exports to Markdown,
• mirrors the export into your Obsidian vault,
• optionally deletes notes that were removed from Joplin.

That gives you an almost perfect mirror without depending on Joplin’s internal database format, which can change over time.