Unfortunately, the most recent Bitwarden ‘feature roadmap’ document made no mention of addressing this glaring omission. They just don’t seem to recognize its severity. 
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Thanks Chris, we appreciate the feedback! There is a lot that goes into Bitwarden to keep things running smoothly behind the scenes, including maintaining current features, building new ones and fixing bugs.
There are a lot of feature requests for the team to consider, so thanks for your patience!
May 2023, LP and various authenticators refugee. Love Bitwarden and Authy. Have just discovered that Bitwarden’s “notes” feature and “attachments” feature are inadequate. Various excuses have been given – none of which really focus on the main use case.
In LP I would keep setup notes for new financial services and IT services. Typically these involve multiple secrets or unique data items. Including email used, possibly separate ID, a PIN, a password and even a separate passphrase, two-factor authentication services used, fingerprints, recovery codes, family member names, and even a “biometric note” (right ring finger) – and subscription cost per year and renewal date. And sometimes account IDs that are separate between physical and virtual.
This is all complex, and sometimes best saved in a structured narrative. Which I would do in LP (it has a usably big window). And then of course separately the password manager would have specific logons for various accounts too - and this is the part that Bitwarden excels at and why I left LP. But the two are not the same: (1) and organized narrative tying together many separate facts, resources, actors etc and (2) the specific and narrow authorization security “fact clusters” necessary for a given login. Give us both and win big and beat all the competition!
“Just saving logons” is not enough. Accounts and services are often complex. And you need to be really, really careful not to get locked out. This is what an ‘attached set of notes’ (probably only 1/2 a page!) is for. Or just notes themselves directly saved in Bitwarden. The current Bitwarden window viewer makes using that set of notes difficult (a simple fix would be allow the window to become full-screen).
This is NOT a “nice to have corner case” that will never be delivered. This is a use case that should be at the center of any Bitwarden users’ workflow.
Please push “secure document viewing” – or just a better in-line secure notes viewing and editing feature – to No. 1 in the development list!
Thanks for considering my views.
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100% agree!!! Unfortunately, it continues to not be a priority to the Bitwarden developers.
I guess they don’t store sensitive attachments in the product. Or if they do, their requiring a process that stores decrypted attachments externally so that external tools can view them hasn’t resulted in the compromising of the information contained in those attachments — at least, not that they know of. 
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While you’re waiting for progress on this feature request, I would suggest exploring the use of Bitwarden’s custom fields, as they are useful for storing the type of structured data you have described.
Yes! Please, please.
Def needed. The use case is having your ID and passport in there, I would want to check (view) info, not download the file (rarely).
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How would this feature really work, though?
What exactly is a “preview” of an encrypted file to which the Bitwarden’s server has no decryption key?
One approach would be to store a locally generated preview of said file inside the user’s vault (generated whenever the file is uploaded/modified) – but that would probably lead to rapid increase of vault size for typical users (and it may not be ideal for Bitwarden’s long term cost, potentially harming everybody).
Another, more conservative, and in my opinion, safer approach, would be to allow users to explicitly mark some file attachments as «available offline», thereby eliminating the need for the download (except when marked for syncing because of changes). Users would simply click the file and it would open.
Can’t believe it’s been 5 years since this request, but still not implemented at all. Viewing photos of sensitive files without having to download them is Crucial. Please consider adding this feature soon.
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This is probably the only thing bothering me with Bitwarden. All other platform I tried handled this correctly.
So (re)adding my voice on this “feature” request.
Thank you.
I just joined recommended to all, except I can’t believe this may be the feature that sends me back to last pass. This needs to be fixed.
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Hello All, I just moved from 1Pass, I cannot believe that you cannot see a basic PNG or JPG without downloading. Such an important function. Very weird decision, Hopefully, someone inside Bitwarden will realise how important it is sooner rather than later.
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Hey guys.
I created a resource in Bitwarden similar to this one, my idea would be for you to configure where the attachements will be synchronized, that way it is not necessary to download the file, just view the file.
Please, see this: Change wehre files are attached. In theory, the user himself can set a limit on the storage of attachments when synchronizing his google drive or dropbox account etc.
that makes sense? what do you all think about this idea?
Echoing all the other users here - pretty shocked that this critical feature isn’t on the roadmap after 5 years of voting. Decided to move over from lastpass last week, but I’ll be looking closer at 1Password now, which was the other potential alternative I short listed. Really too bad - everything else is great, but this is a dealbreaker for my use case. I like to store all sensitive personal info in my vault (medical cards, passports, etc) so I can have it securely with me everywhere on my phone, and certain items need to be viewed regularly. Bitwarden devs, please consider this feature!
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I have always been a heavy user of KeePass, and the client I use on ios is Strongbox. Recently, I am planning to switch to bitwarden. During the test experience, everything was very good, except that I cannot directly view the attachment function.
It is very convenient to view attachments on keepass on the desktop or Strongbox on the mobile phone. You can directly open and view the content (including word\pdf\jpg and other formats) with a click. Bitwarden clicks to download, which is very unsafe and very inconvenient.
On the keepass computer desktop, you can even click to open the attachment to modify it directly. After the modification is completed, click the “Import” button, and the attachment content will be directly updated with the modified content.
Seeing so much user feedback, it’s hard to imagine the feedback from 5 years ago. The important features that our opponents have have not yet been solved.
Some of my bank accounts and securities accounts still use paper password cards. Do I need to add custom fields to hundreds of passwords one by one?
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Wow, this is from March of 2018 and this very simple and obvious feature is still not implemented in spite of so many people asking for it. This makes me think that Bitwarden is not responsive to its users and makes me wonder if I made a mistake in buying premium. When Bitwarden said I had to upgrade to access this feature, I never imagined it was so clunky. I assumed the feature involved just tapping on the image and viewing it.
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Also please add support to heic images for Apple devices.
Without internal support to view at least images and pdf’s the tool fails the whole security point it sis trying to make. Having to download documents to quickly view creates a big security hole as the devices and locations where these files get downloaded to are usually not secured the same way
Welcome to the community @apollo.mcg and @Tony_de_Jesus - thank you for sharing your interest in this feature request, which was previously shared with the Product team! Having a community able to provide so many great ideas to help Bitwarden continue to improve products is a wonderful advantage, along with continued patience as the requests are also balanced with current trends, maintenance of current products and bandwidth of current resources.
I’ve been using Bitwarden for years now. I’d really like this feature to come sooner rather than later.
I cannot believe I paid for premium without researching if this simple feature is included. I will definitely cancel my premium sub on renewal and will leave a negative comment on appstore.