How to Avoid Headaches When Creating SOPs in Notion and ClickUp

Both of these apps work the same when it comes to pasting images from external sources. If you're creating a standard operating procedure or your company wiki using Notion or ClickUp, you'll want to watch out for this.

Watch the video to see the issue, or read on to learn more.

The Problem

I make a lot of documentation for my day job and for just everything in general. And one of the issues I've run into is images are vanishing in Notion. You'll be greeted with a grey box and an error message. This message can be different depending on where the image is.

3 broken images in Notion

The Reason

It's because the images are coming from a third party. And that third party has either removed or relocated those images. When you highlight some content from a webpage, copy it and then paste it into Notion, everything looks like it works.

But if you inspect a little closer, you'll see the images aren't hosted on Notion at all. To see if this is the case with your images, find the View original button on the picture. This will open up a new tab. If Notion hosts the picture, it will open with an AWS link. Otherwise, it will open using a URL of the website you copied the content from.

Here's an example.

Notion on the left with the image external image opened up on the right

I copied some text and 2 images from the Super website. When I go to view the original image, it opens up a Super.site link. So if Super ever delete that image, my Notion documentation is broken.

The Solution

Copy your images separately or upload them using the slash command.

This means documenting your workflow in Notion or ClickUp might take a lot longer. When you find an image you want to add to your page, you'll need to right click the image itself and copy it. Then paste it into the page for it to be hosted on Notion. Or you can use the slash command to upload the image to the page.

It's not an ideal situation and not one that I've see written about in the Notion or ClickUp docs. But it's very handy to know about before you start using these apps. You don't want to come back to your SOP, documentation or company wiki in a years time and find all the images are broken.