Use case or problem
Canvas is an excellent tool for visual thinking, planning, and organizing information. However, when a note is added to a Canvas, the card always displays the note preview. For notes with structured Properties (frontmatter), this often results in cards that contain much more information than is actually needed.
For many workflows, I only want to display a few specific properties rather than the entire note. For example:
- A task card showing only the title, due date, and status.
- A contact card showing only a photo, name, and role.
- A recipe card showing only the cover image and title.
- A project card showing only the project name and current status.
Displaying the full note preview makes large Canvases harder to scan and visually cluttered.
Proposed solution
Allow note cards in Canvas to display selected Properties instead of the default note preview.
For each note card, add a display option that lets users choose which Properties should be shown. For example:
- Title
- Due date
- Status
- Priority
- Owner
- Cover image
- Any custom Property
If a Property contains an image path, Canvas could render it as an image.
For example, given a note with:
---
title: Buy groceries
due: 2026-07-10
status: Todo
priority: High
photo: attachments/groceries.jpg
---
The Canvas card could display only:
📷 photo
Buy groceries
📅 Jul 10
🔴 High
instead of the full note preview.
This would make Canvas much more useful for structured visual workflows such as:
- Project dashboards
- Kanban boards
- Timelines
- Task management
- Contact directories
- Family trees
- Recipe collections
- Book libraries
- Personal dashboards
while keeping the underlying notes unchanged.
Current workaround (optional)
The current workaround is to either:
- duplicate information into separate Canvas text cards,
- create dedicated notes containing only the information intended for display, or
- accept the full note preview even when most of it is irrelevant.
All of these approaches introduce unnecessary maintenance or visual clutter.
Related feature requests (optional)
This feature builds upon the existing support for displaying note Properties in Canvas (implemented in Obsidian 1.9.3).
Instead of simply showing the Properties section, this request proposes allowing selected Properties to become the visual content of the Canvas card itself.