Accelerate Image Drag And Drop

• GitHub project page
• Add-on page

What's this?

This Anki add-on is not for daily use, instead, it helps a very specific situation where you add images to a bunch of notes intensively for a specific period. This add-on provides following features which hopefully make drag&drop of an image from browser far easier.

• Maximize first field of the editor of Note in Browser by shortcut (Shift-Ctrl-E) or (Shift-Cmd-E).
• Preview Previous via shortcut regardless of the focus of fields or window (Shift-Ctrl-P) or (Shift-Cmd-P).
• Preview Next via shortcut regardless of the focus of fields or window (Shift-Ctrl-N) or (Shift-Cmd-N).
• Preview Next and auto-open hyperlink for id="primal-image-link". (Shift-Ctrl-O) or (Shift-Cmd-O).

How to use

Preparation

1. Open Anki browser
2. Choose deck which has notes which you want to add images to them.
3. Necessary only once: Create field and make it come very 1st field.
4. From menu bar execute Widen First field or hit Shift-Cmd-E, then you see 1st field become widen.
5. Open preview window

Repeated steps until you exhausted by adding images to all cards.

1. Drag&drop image from a web browser to wide-orange-1st-field. Then check the preview window.
2. Hit Shift-Cmd-O, it renders a preview of next card then automatically open image search result. So, continue drag&drop!

Notes

• You need to reorder field for image dropping to come very first field in a card.
• Preview Next/Previous shortcut do nothing unless preview window is already opened.
• If you want Preview Next And Click Primal Image Link work, you need to set a card to have a hyperlink with id primal-image-link. ex) <a id="primal-image-link" href="https://www.google.co.jp/search?q={{word}}&tbm=isch">Img</a>.

Background why I created this add-on

This add-on is basically for my own benefits, so I will explain some background. Remembering completely vocabulary is always difficult. To aid to create some clue in my brain, I found associating an image with the vocabulary is really efficient. So I started associating images with each word in my decks which have 12000 vocabularies. Then I noticed

• If the target field for image drag&drop(from a browser) is more broaden, it would be a lot easier to drop an image from a browser.
  • That's why I make the 1st field of editor maximize(800px) and colorize with orange via shortcut.
• When I drag&drop image, I use mouse or trackpad, so focused window or field is not consistent, I wanted to make select next/previous word via shortcut regardless of current focus.
  • That's' why I created a shortcut for previewing next/previous. Note: I intentionally override original Shift-Cmd-P which was assigned to Preview action.

How I use this.

Please ignore this if you find it TOO complex!

I use <a href="https://folivora.ai/>BetterTouchTool which allow me to set a global shortcut to send shortcut key to a specific App.
So I can invoke Preview Next And Click Primal Image Link from outside of Anki, thus I even don't have to activate anki app to open next card and image search result.
I set following global keyboard shortcut to send each key to Anki.app.

• Key Shift-Cmd-N send Shift-Cmd-N to Anki.app
• Key Shift-Cmd-P send Shift-Cmd-P to Anki.app
• Key Shift-Cmd-O send Shift-Cmd-O to Anki.app
• Also key sequence Cmd Cmd send Shift-Cmd-O to Anki.app

So my workflow while I'm adding an image to each note is.

1. Drag&drop image to the wide image field.
2. Then hit Cmd Cmd(type cmd key twice), it makes preview next word on Anki preview window and open new google image link on browser then repeat from step-1.