Add option to show reduced link preview in Canvas

Feature requests
1

Hey :wave: This is my first post here, I tried searching for any related threads but couldn’t find any. Thanks to anyone contributing to this community, quite enjoying Obsidian!

Use case or problem

I often use Canvas to save webpages in a visual way. Currently when I add a link Obsidian embeds a browser allowing me to fully interact with the website. When adding a lot of links to a canvas this results in a lot of browser windows (presumably impacting performance).

As for me the primary use case is more bookmarking, a “lighter representation” would be totally fine. A more consistent displaying of links could even help identifying them better.

Proposed solution

Add an option (global and/or at canvas level) to display links in a “cover mode”. If the option is enabled, show links as a fixed-design card, including site metadata like <title>, <description>, maybe og:image.

FWIW This is similar to how Freeform on Mac behaves when adding links.

Considerations:

  • probably this would need some caching of the metadata

Current workaround (optional)

none

1 Like
2

Definitely advocating for this as well - this is something Freeform does really well.

For example, here is how Freeform handles a video URL (i.e. YouTube), and a regular URL.

Screenshot A - Freeform
Screenshot A - Freeform871Ă—720 185 KB

And here is how the exact same context is displayed in Obsidian Canvas:

Screenshot B - Canvas
Screenshot B - Canvas976Ă—924 192 KB

Freeform’s display and user experience is much nicer and with much less friction. 99% of the time I would prefer accessing a link or video URL saved in Canvas in an external web-browser instead of attempting to wrangle with it within Canvas, which causes friction and turns me away to other tools.