A New Favorite Obsidian Plugin for Handling Images
I use Obsidian for a lot of my day-to-day tasks. It's typically open in the background, with my daily note open for quick notes. During classes, I use Obsidian to type my notes (I love the ability to resize the app pane to a really skinny size, so I can have my lecture notes taking up the majority of the space). I also use it for work - keeping track of sales calls I need to coordinate and daily client priority lists. Additionally, I have folders to keep my personal projects organized: this blog, courses I'm taking, book recaps, chess notes, etc.
Obsidian is lightweight for what it is. It takes up space on your computer, and your files are situated there unless you back it up with other services. If you want to sync it with your mobile devices, you would need to opt-in for their paid Obsidian Sync service1or find another way. As I don't rely on Obsidian that much on my mobile, aside from reading a couple of journal articles before bed, I use DropSync to link to my Android tablet.
However, as Dropbox only has a 2GB limit for the free plan, I've always been worried that my vault will eventually become too large, and I will have to move to another syncing service. I like my current setup and would like to stick with it for as long as possible. I previously used Syncthing and AutoSync (both paired with my vault located in Google Drive), but I always encountered some issues along the way.
Two types of files, other than regular .md files are in my vault. PDFs and pictures. These two take the most space, and it'd only increase with my usage. Furthermore, I will be starting my thesis research very soon - and I like to have my files in my Obsidian so I can highlight them directly and make notes there. For PDFs specifically, I've been using simple online compressors like this to make the size of the files smaller. Not many issues, but it's good practice to always check if the images appear correctly after compression. Text usually ends up fine, but high compression levels seem to make some pictures unviewable.
However, for pictures, I've always been relying on this plugin to get my pictures compressed when pasting them directly into my vault/notes. It works perfectly fine, and it's pretty good if you want everything to be local. But I think I found something better.
enter the new plugin
I've been experimenting with including pictures within my blog posts, and for this one, where I shared my childhood hobby I made video games in stacks of paper, I learnt that you could paste external links to pictures directly into your vault, and you're able to view it as well. I thought that was really cool. I tried Imgur but found the interface to be really clunky and slow. And I saw that in Herman's cheat sheet, he suggested Imgbb. And so I re-uploaded my pictures there and started linking them to my Obsidian note where I was writing that article, so I can directly copy and paste it there. There was a slight hassle as I would have to type out the markdown format to insert the links, but it wasn't too bad.
And then, today, I found the Imgbb Uploader plugin by Jordan Handy. It lets you copy pictures to your clipboard, and simultaneously upload the image into your Imgbb account (via API) when you paste it into your note. And from my usage so far, it is pretty quick. So, you don't have to go through the hassle of getting your picture uploaded to Imgbb pressing into the picture to share the direct link, and then pasting it into your note. I can see it making my workflow a lot faster.
I love it! Also - if you are a user of Imgur: there's this plugin for this by Kirill Gavrilov. It seems pretty similar in function, aside from the platform.
How do you manage media files in your note-taking apps?
Thank you for reading, and if you would like to share any thoughts or if you have any questions at all, feel free to leave a comment :)
[8/100] for #100DaysToOffload
They introduced a new plan last year that brings the cost of the Sync service to 4 USD per month (and another 40% off if you're a student), for a 1GB vault. I think this is pretty sustainable if you have just a few images and PDFs here and there.↩