Obsidian Gets Messy Once Files and AI Enter the Mix
Users are frustrated by the complexity of managing information within Obsidian, particularly as they try to integrate external tools, AI, and diverse file types. The desire for a more fluid and efficient workflow, minimizing organizational overhead and maximizing knowledge retrieval, is a recurring theme. Many feel their current structure is optimized for manual browsing, not for AI or broader use.
SOURCES (60)
“I think we need more specific pain points to help you OP. What exactly are you trying to do? What's wrong with what you're doing? I personally publish/update pages of my vault with a single click. I don't have any pain points to give me…”
“Yes, you can do this in Obsidian. See this page from the help files on embedding other files in notes. https://obsidian.md/help/embeds#Embed+an+audio+file+in+a+note”
“I'm not sure I understand what you're describing or what your use-case looks like. From what I understand you want pdfs and audio files to exist alongside your notes? If so, obsidian does this as well. My vault has pdfs, images, audio files, spreadsheets, and log files. They all exist within my vault, and I can link to them and write notes about them in my markdown notes. For some of them (pdf and images) I can embed those into my notes as well.”
“No, the main issue is you have to pay for models and having local models is hard because they require a lot of processing”
“Yes that's what I mean by main page. The first page when I open Obsidian. I use claude to vibecode.”
“I mostly just use my notes for documentation of commands I use a lot, or how I installed/setup a certain thing. I revisit them basically every day because of that lol”
“Word docs also have headings, and you can edit the style for each level. I use a lot of headings whether in markdown or word. I use obsidian for personal notes at work, but convert to word when at the point to share with coworkers. The thing with OneNote that drove me crazy was that you could use Headings, but there's no navigation.”
“I write a lot in markdown (using Obsidian, VS Code) and I’ve noticed I retain much less of what I wrote compared to when I used Word or LaTeX. My guess is that every file looks the same and there is no page layout to anchor things to, so I lose the cue of “where on the page was that.” I am curious whether anyone notices this and what to do about it. submitted by /u/Universal_Adapter_15 [link] [comments]”
“When I want to publish something I've written in my zettelkasten, I have to export it, add it to wherever, reformat it, then do the publishing. I hate the Obsidian publish option because I want to use the output from my notes for something else, not just a webpage. Anyone else feeling trapped in their vault? Do I just suck it up? submitted by /u/Difficult-Passion318 [link] [comments]”
“I wanted to, but it never happened. You have to come up with a way to make them resurface from time to time. Databases embedded in the daily note is my solution for this”
“Daily work plan, meeting notes. Having my AI clanker as my secretary is a Godsend. I attend many meetings with different contexts. I have long forgotten what we discussed last time. Before meeting: Hey Cursor, prepare pre-read and questions to ask. After meeting: Teams meeting AI transcript > Hey Cursor, summarise and reconcile with notes. Weekly: Hey Cursor, write my weekly update.”
“Yeah, I can see that. For personal notes, it might work fine, but for a larger team, you’d definitely need something more robust to handle the conflicts and syncing issues.”
“My notes go into dailies, and thing I want to retrieve get tagged or links added. Tags are for things that dont need extra definition but I'm want to easily find, like timestamps of when I last took medicine or when I gave my dog a bath. Links are when I might want to consolidate a topic later. So if I open a page that's a topic, I check the backlinks for anything new to fold in.”
“It can be pretty eye-opening to think about how different people use their notes. Some might just jot things down and never look back, which is such a different approach.”
“I use Word to take notes on SQL, Golang, and so on. I’ve been trying to switch to Obsidian for a few days, but it’s difficult for me because there’s no way to read my notes in their entirety. I’ve tried exporting them to PDF and installing various plugins, but I still haven’t been able to create a simple PDF with separate pages for my notes. Is there really no solution? submitted by /u/MoonVanilla [link] [comments]”
“For those who use Obsidian as a “second brain,” how often do you actually revisit your notes after writing them? Do you regularly review them, or do you mostly rediscover them when searching for something related? More importantly, does keeping a second brain actually help you? If so, how? Does it help you remember, connect ideas, create, or solve problems? I’m curious how people actually get value from their notes after they write them down. submitted by /u/Illustrious-Pay-7516 [lin”
“This is why I used tags too. I have a note where I included all the tags I use in my obsidian and it basically acts as a "file explorer". Except one note can be in three "folders" if I assigned it to three tags. I've turned off the graph view, but I did notice my "file explorer" note looking like the origin of the universe. My notes are in one giant folder because that's how I used Google keep and whilst I was excited for how advanced obsidian was and the fo”
“I put out the canvas page in the latest release. half the tools aren't wired up properly so you might see some weird behavior but bug reports would be welcomed”
“It's cool that you're diving into recipes with Obsidian! The frontmatter can be really handy once you get the hang of it, especially for organizing different types of notes.”
“i think you have to work more on it. yes it shows folders which we can scroll through. ✅ But after Adding new note or folder it do not show up in widget if you ask me what about adding from main obsidian by creating new note on that selected folder ? my answer is NO may be it do not Sync and interesting thing is if we add new note from widget it shows in main obsidian (but unfortunately it shows in main vault (do not show up in that selected folder for widget)”
there are plugins that let you draw in the actual markdown notes now
“Thanks for the timing on this. I've been taking notes using obsidian for the list three years but I've been very frontmatter-averse up to this point, opting instead to have a meta callout with fields instead on the off chance that I might use dataviewJS if I needed some kind of searching to happen. But lately I created a new section in my vault for recipes and subsequently created task for me to research bases and frontmatter b/c the whole thing for interactive feedback, especially on th”
“Agree Obsidian Git can do a lot of Git things well, but it’s not specifically built for the “cloud-style” sync workflow, especially crash/recovery and smooth multi-device conflicts. If you want team work with more than 10 people, it could struggle.”
“My software is all just traditional code, no AI or RAG in it. It's a remote MCP server that uses either Obsidian Sync or git to sync. It provides indexed search and other MCP tools. Obsidian Sync doesn't have any mechanism for tracking who/what edited things, but it does let you see the log for sync status. I do show the Obsidian Sync log in the admin control panel. Git of course tracks things in detail, so you have more granularity. I don't have any RAG search, just a "traditio”
“I started using Obsidian a few days back and I like it's graph feature where all notes create a good looking graph. But there is a huge learning curve and I am getting used to it. I am a Notion user and not sure if it'll be able to replace my Notion use.”
“Mostly documents and sometimes random notes. Then Obsidian is basically where the cleaned-up version ends up”
“there is a simple search function in obsidian to find your note without having to dig through your folders too”
“How do you handle moving short term memory to long term so that old decisions and such don’t pollute present day?”
“Do you work independently or do you work for a company or organization? If the former, you're gonna be taking these digital notes in some capacity - if they expect you not to, they're crazy. If the latter, I'm certain your IT department is slackin' if there isn't an already written policy on this. I don't even necessarily think all companies should do that, just depends on the nature of the work. Regardless, should you use it, separate it to it's own vault. Normally I”
“I'm getting to the point where I'm half expecting to see someone wanting to run Doom in obsidian.”
Knowledge requires engagement. You’re hoarding information, not knowledge.
“Sounds like a cool setup. Daily notes are such a great way to keep track of everything, especially with the way you can rearrange them to fit your workflow.”
“For me I have a prompt that tells me what I can learn from a certain clipping and I decide if I what to keep from the clippings. Sometimes I just keep the ideas the AI gives me. Also just think what made you decide to click on the clip button and trying to fix that "issue".”
“While I admittedly do use folders, my vault's organization is driven by List Property Links (the contextual connections across notes) and Maps of Contents (MoC) Notes (the index or contents landing page notes). To every note, I add a List Property called MoC containing the link to the note's parent note, generally a MoC note. This establishes a hierarchical wiki-like repository. And honestly, while I do use folders, I could dump everything into just a few folders, and it wouldn't imp”
“Yep! but i know where they're coming from, If i were them I'd also criticize a lil bit. I have tried to read guides about obsidian and tried reading Obsidian help docs and it helped phenomenally to structure my notes!”
“Your Obsidian notes are files on your computer. They'll be shared only if you share them. They'll leave your device only if you send them. E.g., sharing, syncing, publishing, querying with an external component such as an LLM, storing on iCloud/OneDrive/Google Docs/Dropbox. If you're permitted to keep certain information on your computer, and you keep it there, then there you go. As for separating personal and work vaults, that may be determined by what you're permitted to mix. O”
“the truth is when i began few months ago i started with a canvas page but eventually realized I wanted to write in the Obsidian live editor, so there is technically canvas integration but IDK if i will put it on a live build as it is, it is kinda broken :shrug: thank you for the kind words.”
“Hello! I use Obsidian heavily in my personal life; however, I'm about to start some consulting projects and would like some advice on taking notes and tracking tasks. Main question(s): Can I use my personal vault to record consultancy-related notes that will never be shared with anyone or should I set up a separate vault? If separate, should I have one vault per company? Some background/details: The life science companies (e.g. biotech, pharma) for which I'll consult deal in highly propr”
“Did you see this guide? Might be useful: https://citationstyler.com/en/knowledge/how-to-use-zotero-with-obsidian-knowledge-management/”
“Estoy pensando usar obsidian para crear reportes/informes ya que me hace mucho más cómodo escribir y formatear el texto, actualmente lo hago de forma parcial al final copio el contenido de la nota y lo pegó en word online le deja un formato bastante bueno pero quería automatizar esa parte con pandoc, convertir directo de md a docx, de igual manera no sé si exista algún plugin que use IA para que me ayude a mejorar la estructura, redacción y ortografía de mis notas? No sé si alguien está haciendo”
“Emile van Keieken uses the same system of using several categories in types and pairs with a fork of notebook navigator https://www.emilevankrieken.com/blog/2025/academic-obsidian/”
“I feel you. Same split here. Obsidian for the notes I actually want to keep, and the PDFs / one-time links / screenshots-of-thought just make the vault noisy if I force them in. I text that overflow into Sunchay now (I can get you a good discount) and it's pretty much the only place I save stuff now. Honestly as a Apple Notes + Notion + Obsidian user, I think I found a home for all my knowledge. Do you already have a junk drawer folder, or is everything still landing in the vault?”
“Do you plan on incorporating any handwriting-to-text functionality? I have been looking for something like this for a little bit. I haven't seen anyone do it, but this seems like the closest I have found so far!”
“Text type property, but it automatically suggests previously used text so that's good enough for me to keep it consistent!”
do you use a dropdown type for the status property or just freeform text?
“I connected librechat to my vault - indeed an insanely powerful mix to really work woth your notes. Your app is going in the same direction?”
Just chiming in years later to say this is the best solution I've found, thank you!
“Those two are probably fine actually - they mostly rearrange stuff Obsidian already knows (dates, paths, links) rather than reading note bodies. The expensive ones are the ones parsing what's inside your notes. Not a hard rule but it's the better version of what I said.”
“I apologize that is because the release got too low of a score on the automated plugin review. not for bugs - just some general untidiness of comments and code. currently doing some housecleaning to get validated against their review. I am submitting it again as soon as i finish writing this comment”
“My ~1,700 notes sit in a few dumb containers (References, Journal, Attachments) — the actual structure is a categories property plus one page per category that does nothing but embed a Base. Same idea kepano uses. I got lucky on the Dataview migration everyone here is describing, because I never installed it in the first place; what's left is either core or does exactly one small thing (Templater, Homepage, Hider + Minimal settings). The daily note lasted three days. What survived instead is”
“I’m also using a pretty Kepano-ish setup, and I think there’s a point where Obsidian is much better at helping me think and remember than actually pushing me to do things. I like daily notes for capturing what’s happening, project notes for context, and then coming back to those things through reviews. That part works really well for me. But for something that genuinely needs my attention at a specific time, I’d probably keep using Calendar/Reminders rather than trying to turn Obsidian into a no”
“Had the same debate. My split: paper for thinking, Obsidian for keeping. The slowness of handwriting is the filter — only notes that earn it get digitized, the rest stays analog and that's fine. I solved the transfer pain by switching to a reMarkable: I tag the pages worth keeping and they land in my vault as searchable text, with handwriting recognition running locally — no cloud LLM, which was a hard requirement for me too. Wrote up the full reasoning here: https://blog.hochbichler.com/tag”
You don't have to read it. Just get an AI to summarise it for you.😉