Inline local images as base64

Goal: Make a document self-contained by embedding its local image files directly into it as data: URIs — handy for pasting a doc somewhere that can’t resolve relative image paths (a Slack message, a single-file export).

Prerequisites: The --allow-read flag, since this reads image files from disk. Only local images are touched; URLs with a scheme (https://, …) or already-data: URIs are left alone.

Query

$ mq --allow-read=. 'select(.image) | embed_images(., ".")' doc.md

Input

![Logo](logo.png)

![External](https://example.com/pic.png)

Output

![Logo](data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAIAAACQd1PeAAAADElEQVR4nGP4z8AAAAMBAQAY3Y2wAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC)

![External](https://example.com/pic.png)

Notes

• Unlike most mq functions, embed_images takes the node as an explicit first argument, not implicitly through the pipe — embed_images(., base_dir), not embed_images(base_dir) alone. Calling it as embed_images(base_dir) silently returns base_dir itself instead of erroring, which is easy to miss.
• The base directory (second argument, default ".") is where relative image paths like logo.png are resolved from — it’s usually the directory containing the Markdown file, not the current working directory, if they differ.
• Combine with -U to keep the rest of the document (non-image nodes) intact in the output.