I knew that if I posted a question I'd immediately find the answer. We had removed the Markdown plugin due to warnings in the logs just to be safe and had not added it back in yet. Once we put that back, bam, images are back. Thanks!
You'll need to also check out the 0.5.1 branch of the vanilla theme as well.
Reload button in ACP
Subcategory selection in categories page of ACP
Various other fixes
@Mega Completely fixed. used the plugin admin interface to uninstall (unbuild) every theme including lavender & vanilla.
Browsed to the node_module directory made sure all nodebb-theme-* were gone.
made sure I stopped the server
then did some 'npm install nodebb-theme-vanilla'
then 'npm install nodebb-theme-lavender'
start the server again then click theme in admin USE lavender and presto everything's back working
cheers, looks like a tonne easier adding your own Custom HTML/CSS, saves all your settings that way
