How to Organize Attachments in Obsidian


Video Transcript with Timestamps


00:01

Good evening Adam here. Today I want to show you how to keep your attachments inside Obsidian nice and organized, so they don’t just end up in a giant list along the left hand column. When I, when I’m talking about attachments, I’m usually talking about PDFs, video files, image files, Obsidian. Most people just think about it as a text ed ender, because that’s the essential function, is you’re going to write text, you’re going to hyperlink it to other text, but it actually incorporates other file types quite easily, quite cleanly, and if you’re not using it to incorporate attachments, you really should be. I’m just going to use this as an example. Let’s say I have a PDF that PDF I want to save in this file. What I’m going to do is I will just take it out of the folder where it is on my computer, which in this case is my downloads folder, and then I’m just going to click it and drag it.


01:06

It’s that easy. And let go. And then here it is. It actually has a built in PDF viewer. If you check the Markdown language, you’ll actually see there’s an exclamation point and then the brackets which sends the link to where this file is exclamation point, makes it appear directly in the document. That’s different conversation for a different day. You can actually look at the PDF right here. You’ll see that now it’s in your main folder. You click on it here and that’s obviously the full screen version of it. What you’re going to want to do if you were to go now into where your Obsidian lives. I keep mine inside of my Dropbox. So here’s my Obsidian folder. Personal Obsidian. It’s in my Dropbox folder. That way I can use in the multiple machines I’ll click on here and you’re going to see it’s right here.


01:58

So that’s not terribly organized. What you’re going to want to do is don’t do it inside the file browser. That actually makes it very confused. You’re just going to click it and you’re going to make folders. For me, I just have a PDF folder. I have a business card folder as well. You get it as narrow as you want. I don’t think you need much more other than a file type and maybe some other categories because you’re going to be able to see where it’s linked to. Because for me, I’m already using this one somewhere. You’re just going to click it and then you’re going to drag it. I’ll show you already have it in there. You’re just going to click it, drag it into the PDF folder. Using another example of one perhaps that I haven’t already placed, let’s do an image file. For that, let me see what I’ve got.


02:58

Okay, there we are. So I have an image file. It was a 403 error on something I was trying to fix for Media Wiki site. Let’s just say I want to show what I had to do to fix this error. I can drag my screenshot in, and then here’s my screenshot. That’s what I had to send to the support people to get it fixed. Let’s just say I want to document that. Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to click it, drag it, and then later, if I want to check on it, where it’s linked, it’s like, why do I have this 403 error file? You’ll find the link mentioned is in this example page. You just click on it there, and there it is. Now if I go into my personal Obsidian dropbox folder and I go to attachments jpegs, it’s going to be right here as well.


03:51

That is how you keep things nice and organized. Really not terribly complicated. I would highly suggest you at least just do it based on file type. Again, I don’t think it’s terribly necessary to do anymore. I did business cards as well, but honestly, I could have just done those as image files because they’re attached to my people. I’m not going to show you who’s in there, but it’s attached to my people folder, so it’s probably unnecessary to organize it like this. I may at some point simplify it down. It’s as simple as click on it dragging and dropping. I hope this was useful. I’m probably going to make some more Obsidian videos. I’ve been getting pretty into using Obsidian recently, along with Monday is my other big program, so I hope you enjoyed. Thanks.

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