Image

The Image tool puts a raster on the chart and holds it there by two corners, each carrying a price and a time. That is the important part: the picture is not floating in screen space, it belongs to a region of the chart. Pan or zoom and it travels with the bars it was placed against, so a screenshot of a previous setup stays beside the bars it is being compared to rather than drifting away from them.

One click drops an empty frame; the picture is chosen second. You can click the empty frame to open a file picker, drag a file onto it, or simply paste — a screenshot on the clipboard lands directly in the selected frame. Once a picture is in place the frame adopts its aspect ratio, which is why an image on a Quatick chart has no letterbox bands or dark surround: the frame is the picture, and dragging the corner scales it rather than adding empty margin around it.

Everything about the picture can be changed without leaving the chart. Opacity and greyscale settle the question of a reference image competing with live candles; brightness and contrast rescue a dark screenshot; rotation and flip handle a capture that arrived the wrong way round; crop chooses what part of a wide picture the frame shows. The intent is that a picture pulled in mid-analysis needs no round trip through an image editor.

1. 1
   Select the Image tool

   Click the Image icon in the annotation group, or press Alt+I.
2. 2
   Click to place the frame

   One click drops an empty frame at that price and time. It shows a dashed outline reading "Click to add image".
3. 3
   Add the picture

   Click inside the empty frame to open a file picker, drag an image file onto it, or press Cmd/Ctrl+V to paste a screenshot from the clipboard.
4. 4
   Size and place it

   Drag a corner to scale. The aspect ratio is held, so the picture never distorts and never gains empty margins.
5. 5
   Adjust it

   Open the popup for opacity, brightness, contrast, blur, greyscale, rotation, flip, crop mode, border and caption.

• Setup comparison — drop a screenshot of the same pattern from an earlier date beside the current one. Seeing both at once is what turns "this looks familiar" into a testable claim.
• Cross-market context — place a capture of a correlated instrument (DXY on a EUR chart, VIX on an index chart) next to the price action it is supposed to explain.
• Published research — paste a chart from a research note or a broker's morning piece, tag it as a reference, and mark where your own read differs.
• Desk branding — put a firm logo on a chart before it leaves the building, so a screenshot forwarded onward still says who produced it.
• Annotated hand-off — capture a colleague's marked-up chart and place it alongside yours rather than trying to reconcile two files.
• Trade review — attach the order ticket or fill confirmation next to the bar it executed on, so the journal entry needs no external lookup.

A reference image has to be legible enough to read and quiet enough to ignore. Two settings do most of that work. Drop opacity to 55–75% and the candles behind stay visible, which keeps the picture from reading as part of the live chart. Turn on greyscale and the picture stops competing for attention with the coloured bars, while its shapes remain perfectly clear — this matters most when the reference is itself a chart, because two sets of red and green candles side by side are genuinely hard to tell apart.

For pictures that will be shared, turn on the reference tag. A chart circulated with an embedded screenshot invites the reasonable question "is that this instrument or another one?", and a corner badge answers it before anyone has to ask. Pair it with a caption naming the instrument and date, and the picture carries its own provenance.

Images are stored with the drawing as data, not as a link to a file on disk. That is what lets an annotated chart survive a reload, a different machine, or being handed to a colleague — there is no path to break. The trade-off is size: the limit is 8MB per picture, and a chart carrying several large screenshots takes correspondingly longer to save and load. Screenshots cropped to the region that matters are both more readable and considerably smaller than full-desktop captures.

Remote URLs are also accepted and are stored by reference, which keeps the drawing small. The trade-off reverses: the picture disappears if the host removes it, and it will not render at all without a network connection. Prefer pasted or uploaded files for anything you expect to refer back to.

• 1.Chart annotation best practices — TradingView Help
• 2.The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — Edward R. Tufte
• 3.Trade journaling and post-trade review — Investopedia