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New in Ellipsus: April 2025

Add images, flesh out your fic, and decode those oh-so-cryptic doc titles. This month we delivered several updates to help bring your projects to life.

Written by
  • Kate Donahue
Publish date
06/05/2025
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Add images to your docs

Research, reference images, not-so-SFW fan art—images can be just as crucial to the writing process as the words themselves, and now they can all live in Ellipsus.

Upload, drag ‘em, paste ‘em in—it’s easy to add images to your drafts and docs, as long as they’re the right file format (JPG, JEPG, PNG, or SVG) and size (512KB). Plus there’s no limit on the number of images you (or your collaborators) can add. Learn more about image support in the help center.

One thing to note is that—PDFs aside—your images don’t travel outside your docs; i.e., no hotlinking. There are two reasons for this:

Preventing abuse / managing costs: We want to avoid people treating Ellipsus as a pure image-storing service. It's not just a financial consideration—it could open us up to other problems if bad actors start using Ellipsus with the sole intention to distribute image links.

Limiting who can see and share your images: We're honored that you trust us with your writing, and we want you to feel the same way about images. In addition to being deliberate about where they're stored (Ireland), we're also deliberate about how they can be shared. Image links are protected by default, so anyone you’re not collaborating with who tries to open an image link will be redirected to a 404 page.

Have fun, and please don’t melt our servers!

Plan your fic with 3 new templates

Our latest batch of templates is dedicated to fan writers—bring your blorbos to life (or kill them, or resurrect them from the dead …) and then give them all the emotional depth and drama they deserve!

Head to your dashboard to explore all 13 templates. What templates should we work on next? Let us know over our our ideas board!

Manage your dashboard

Many of you are contending with a growing number of Ellipsus docs! We’re adding two small improvements that emphasize the “p” in WIP.

Doc sorting is smarter

We’ve updated the logic for document timestamps to provide a more accurate overview of recent activity. In addition to editing main, all of these actions will be reflected in your doc’s last edited timestamp:

  • Renaming or adding a description
  • Creating, editing, or duplicating a draft
  • Adding or removing a collaborator

Decode docs with descriptions

That clever title you hammered out at 3 AM? It’s a little less clear in the harsh light of day. Now, just like folders, documents can have descriptions. Descriptions are visible to any invited collaborators, which offers a little more flexibility in how you use them. For instance:

  • Summarize your story or chapter (the florals in spring of use cases, yes)
  • Share the latest status (e.g., Looking for input on X, Y, Z; working through a specific scene, etc.)
  • Note the relationship between docs in a folder

Syncing and growing pains

Does it feel like you’ve been seeing "Saved locally” more often? It’s not just you. At peak times, our synchronizers have been straining to keep up with the amount of people writing between 9 PM and 1 PM UTC. One the one hand, it’s one of those “good” problems to have—enough people are using Ellipsus that we need to scale our systems. But nothing about it feels good if loading lags, your collaborator’s changes don’t show up right away, and an ominous yellow dot looms over your writing. Actually, it kind of sucks.

We’ve been working on the problem from several angles—everything from scaling up our machines to handle the increased traffic to finer-grained performance optimizations in the code. There’s still a lot of work ahead of us, but we hope you’re starting to notice a difference.

Want to connect with a like-minded community and get the latest news on Ellipsus? Join our Discord to follow announcements and share your feedback.

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