Cover Image
A note can carry a cover: a band across the top of the page, above the title, spanning the full width of the window. A cover is either a picture or a wash — one of twelve flat gradients that ship with the app.
Adding a Cover
Hover the area above a note's title. Three buttons fade in: Add cover, Add tag and Add property.
Add cover opens the cover picker. It is a command palette, not a gallery: one search field, a row of tabs, and a grid you can walk with the arrow keys. ↵ applies the highlighted cover. ⌘↵ applies it and drops straight into repositioning. esc closes without changing anything.
Washes
The first tab. Twelve gradients, no file and no download, applied the instant you press ↵. A wash costs nothing to sync and looks identical on every device, which makes it the fastest way to give a note a face. Typing in the search field filters the washes by name and never leaves your device.
Photos
Search Unsplash and use a photo as the cover. This tab only appears in builds configured with an Unsplash access key.
Opening the tab fills it with a set of photos before you type anything, so there is always something to pick. The set is chosen fresh each time the picker opens.
Typing searches Unsplash while this tab is selected, and only while it is selected. On every other tab the search field is a local filter, so the words you type stay on your machine.
Pressing ↵ downloads the chosen photo into the note's own attachments folder before it becomes the cover. The cover is a file in your vault like any other, so it keeps working offline and the app never reaches out to Unsplash to paint a page. The photographer's name and a link back to the photo are stored with it and shown on the cover when you hover it.
The remaining hourly request allowance sits at the end of the tab row. Searches are debounced and cached for as long as the picker is open, so browsing a term costs a single request.
From note
Images the vault already holds, shown as a grid of the pictures themselves, each captioned with the note that stores it. Picking one references the existing file rather than copying it, so the same picture can head two notes without a second copy. See Attachments for how vault attachments work.
Link
A picture somewhere on the web. Paste its address into the search field and the tab offers to use it.
memrynote downloads the image into this note's attachments folder rather than pointing the note at the address. The note keeps a vault path like every other cover, so the picture works offline, on your other devices, and after the page behind the link goes away. Nothing is fetched from that site again.
A link that answers with a web page rather than an image — the common case when you copy the address of a photo's page instead of the photo — is refused and says so, as is an image larger than 25 MB.
Upload
A picture from your computer, stored in this note's attachments folder.
Repositioning a Photo
A photo is cropped to the band, so a tall image has to lose something. Hover the cover and choose Reposition, or use ⌘↵ when applying it, then drag up and down to choose which part of the picture the band keeps. ↑ and ↓ nudge it two percent at a time.
save and cancel sit in the cover's lower corner while you are repositioning, in place of the usual toolbar; ↵ and esc do the same. Clicking anywhere else on the page also saves the framing, so you are never stuck in reposition.
Washes have no reposition control. A gradient has nothing to reframe.
Changing or Removing a Cover
Hover the cover. A small toolbar appears in its lower corner: Change, Reposition, and an ✕ that removes the cover. Change reopens the picker. Removing takes the cover off the note and clears its keys from the frontmatter; the picture stays in your vault, and nothing else about the note changes.
If the Picture Is Missing
A photo whose file has been moved, deleted, or has not finished syncing to this device paints a wash instead, chosen from the note's own identity so it is the same wash every time you open it. You will never see a broken-image icon in a note.
How It Is Stored
The cover lives in the note's YAML frontmatter, on root keys:
---
cover: ../attachments/a1b2c3d4/e5f6g7-harbour.jpg
coverFocus: 42
coverCredit: Ana Ferreira
coverCreditUrl: https://unsplash.com/photos/Qx7a2Kp9
---cover is either a path relative to the note, an http/https URL, or wash: followed by a wash name such as wash:sage. coverFocus is the vertical framing, from 0 for the top of the picture to 100 for the bottom. The two credit keys are written only for a photo that came from Unsplash. Every key is optional and each one is written only when it has something to say.
A cover path is never absolute, like /Users/you/vault/attachments/..., and that is deliberate. An absolute path describes one machine's filesystem. The moment the note reaches a second device through sync, that path points at nothing: a different home directory, a different vault location, sometimes a different operating system. A note-relative path is the only shape that still means the same image on both ends.
The file stays a plain markdown file with a plain frontmatter block, so another editor reading the same vault sees readable cover: lines rather than anything memrynote-specific.
When cover Is Just a Property
cover is an ordinary word, and it was a usable property name long before it meant a picture. A book note with cover: Hardback in its frontmatter is saying something about the binding.
So the key alone does not make a cover — the value does. memrynote treats these keys as cover data only when the value looks the part: an image path, an http/https URL, or a wash name for cover; a number between 0 and 100 for coverFocus; a link for coverCreditUrl. Anything else stays a plain text property and shows in the properties list exactly as it did before, untouched.
Where Covers Appear
Covers are a note-page feature. Journal entries and the template editor do not show one.
A cover key in a journal file or a template is left alone — it is read and written back as it was found, so nothing is lost if the file came from somewhere else or you added the key by hand.