Photos in a sheet

Drop a photo onto the grid, paste one from the clipboard, or press Insert image in the bar at the bottom. It is placed over the cell you were on, at full quality, inside the same file as the rest of the sheet.

What that means day to day#

• It moves with the grid. Add or delete rows and columns above it and it stays over the same content.
• It keeps its own size. Resizing the column it sits on does not squash the photo. Drag the picture's handles to change its size.
• The cell is still usable. Nothing is hidden inside the cell, so the sheet still adds up.
• It survives Excel. An Excel export writes the picture back with its anchor, so a sheet that came from Excel and goes back to Excel does not move or rescale its images.
• Delete it with the keyboard. Select the picture and press Backspace or Delete. That removes the picture, not the cell contents.

Old sheets with photos inside cells#

Nemi used to squeeze a photo into the cell itself. Those sheets still open, and the first time somebody with edit rights opens one, each old in-cell photo is converted into an anchored picture over exactly the cell it was in. It looks identical: same position, same size. From that point on it behaves like every other picture, which is to say it moves, resizes and exports properly. You do not have to do anything, and nothing is lost. Somebody opening the sheet read-only sees the old rendering until an editor opens it.

Size, formats and storage#

Where photos do and do not follow the file#

A .nemi export carries the image bytes inside it, so it opens complete on another account or another machine. An Excel export fetches every picture and writes it into the workbook, and warns you if one could not be fetched rather than handing you a silently incomplete file. A PDF renders the sheet as it looks, pictures included. CSV, TSV, JSON and Markdown are text formats with no way to hold an image, so they carry the values only.