Workbench

org-download is one of the single most useful packages I've discovered since I began using org-mode; it reduces so much of the friction I always had when trying to include images in org documents.

A pattern I've found myself using fairly regularly is:

1. Send some photos from my phone to my laptop with kde-connect
2. Use fd-find to get a list of those newly downloaded photos
3. Yank the list of new photos into a buffer
4. Process the list of files one at a time with org-download-image

This is still faster than dealing with attachments, but it got old enough that I wrote a function to automate it:

The org-download-image-fd function

  (defcustom org-download-image-fd-path "/usr/bin/fd"
    "System path to the fd-find command"
    :type 'file
    :group 'org-download)

  (defun org-download-image-fd (fd-args)
    "Execute the fd system command and run 'org-download-image' on each result."
    (interactive "sargs to pass to fd:")
    (let* ((fd-result (shell-command-to-string (format "%s %s" org-download-image-fd-path fd-args)))
    	 (new-files (split-string fd-result "\n")))
;;      (message fd-result)
      (dolist (file new-files )
        (org-download-image (format "file://%s" file)))))

Depending on how you installed fd-find on your system, you may need to customize org-download-image-fd-path^[1]. When in doubt, run:

which fd

When run, the function prompts you for a list of arguments to pass to the fd command, runs fd, and runs org-download-image on each file found at the current point.

Example Usage

If I've just transferred a few PNG images to my ~/Downloads folder, I can quickly add them at the current point in an org-mode buffer by running:

M-x org-download-image-fd-path

At the args to pass to fd: prompt, I can enter:

'*.png' -tf --changed-within 5m /home/[my-user-name]/Downloads

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1. The Debian Linux fd-find package installs the command as /usr/bin/fdfind ↩︎

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Sun Mar 01 2026 19:00:00 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time)