How to Solve Annotations Not Moving With Images in Microsoft OneNote

Microsoft OneNote is one of the best note-taking apps and for all the right reasons. And while it’s packed with useful features, it sorely lacks an important element – the ability to annotate images. Wait, you can annotate images in OneNote. Yes, but as you move the image, the annotations stay in place and do not move with the image as they should.

OneNote has a glaring problem where annotations are added as an overlay. They are not part of the image file itself. As a result, when you move the image, the annotations do not move, resulting in multiple adjustments and a tedious note-taking experience.

Here are some solutions to resolve this issue until Microsoft releases an appropriate update.

1. Use an extension: awesome screenshot

Why not annotate the image before saving it to OneNote? Awesome Screenshot is a free screenshot extension for all Chromium-based browsers. That means it will work on Chrome, Edge and Brave. You can trim an entire web page, just the visible area of ​​the page, take scrolling screenshots, or save images with just a few clicks.

After taking a screenshot, you will see many annotation options on a handy toolbar.

You can crop the image, add arrows and text, blur sensitive areas, highlight important areas, add emojis and a few other shapes, add numbers to represent steps, and much more. There is also an option to create a video of what is happening on your screen.

Some cloud storage services are supported, but OneDrive is not one of them. For now, you can save the image or web page as a PDF or image file on your desktop or print it. You can then easily save it to OneNote. Want to make changes? The awesome screenshot also works with local images, and you can also take a screenshot from the desktop.

Awesome Screenshot is free, but connecting to cloud apps like Slack and Dropbox requires a subscription.

Download Awesome Screenshot Extension

4. Move the annotated image to OneNote later

Let’s say you have annotated an image and it is securely stored in a note in OneNote. For some reason, you should move this image, but not unless the annotations have been added before adding the image to be rated. As we have shown you in point 1 above. If annotations were added using the OneNote tools, they would not move with the image.

One way to fix this is to take a screenshot of the image with annotations on it and save it to the desktop. You can do this with the Awesome Screenshot extension or any other application. Delete the old image, then add the new one again where you want after making the changes.

One problem, OneNote

Annotation is the only problem I have with OneNote. Everything else works fine. I would recommend using Awesome Screenshot or another image annotation tool. Do not delete the original image after adding it to OneNote. Save it in a folder named OneNote Annotations. That way, if you need to make other changes to the image, you can do it in the original image and replace it on OneNote instead of using the OneNote annotation tool.

Microsoft Edge offered an annotation tool built into their browser, but not anymore. I hope Microsoft will add it to their new Edge Chromium browser. OneNote also offers its own Clipper web browser extension, but you can only highlight text with it. No way to highlight or annotate images.

For now, you have the above options for annotating images in OneNote.