v4.8 — image hosting (图床): the last step between writing and publishing

Markdown's dirty secret is that images don't travel. A note that renders perfectly on your machine — with screenshots saved to _assets/ — falls apart the moment you paste it into a GitHub issue, a WeChat 公众号 draft, or a blog engine, because every image is a local path. SoloMD 4.8 (released June 29) closes that gap: paste an image and it can go straight to your image host, with the returned URL inserted instead.

Five backends, zero SoloMD servers

The design constraint was the same one behind SoloMD's sync: we don't want to be a SaaS, and your images shouldn't route through our infrastructure. So 4.8 ships five bring-your-own backends:

• PicGo — talks to the local PicGo server, so whatever PicGo can upload to, SoloMD can too.
• Custom command — run any script (PicGo-Core, uPic, your own uploader) and read the URL back from stdout.
• SM.MS — token-based, the simplest hosted option.
• S3-compatible — Aliyun OSS, Tencent COS, Cloudflare R2, MinIO; endpoint + bucket + keys.
• GitHub repo + CDN — commit images to a repo, serve via jsDelivr-style CDN URLs.

Between PicGo and the custom command, anything with an uploader — 七牛, 又拍, Imgur, a self-hosted Chevereto — plugs in without us shipping a dedicated integration.

The fallback is the feature

Auto-upload on paste is only trustworthy if it can't lose your image. When the host is unreachable — you're offline, the token expired, the bucket policy changed — SoloMD falls back to the normal local copy in _assets/ and tells you, instead of blocking the paste or silently dropping the screenshot. Writing flow first; publishing plumbing second. When you're back online, a single command uploads all local images in the current note and rewrites the links, so catching up after an offline stretch is one action, not a manual hunt.

The rest of the surface is small on purpose: an "insert image from URL" command for images that already live somewhere, and a keep-local-copy option so uploads can double as backups — the note links to the URL, but the file also stays in _assets/.

Why this matters for the CJK publishing workflow

A large share of SoloMD's users write in Chinese and publish to platforms — 公众号, 知乎, 掘金, personal blogs — that all want URLs, not attachments. The pre-4.8 workflow was: write in SoloMD, then round-trip every screenshot through PicGo or a browser upload page, then fix the links. 4.8 folds that into the paste itself. Combined with "copy as rich HTML" (which already carried styles into 公众号 editors), the write→publish path now has no manual image step at all.

SoloMD is a free, MIT-licensed Markdown editor for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android — solomd.app. Configure image hosting in Settings → Writing; full release notes on the what's new page.