Attachments copies in Vault

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1

Use case or problem

Obsidian copies the attachment into the vault to open it. On one hand, it may be suitable for images, but it is really a storage problem to copy large pdf’s into the vault from folders where the books are sorted according to their topics. I cannot delete them from their original location, and yet cannot arrange them properly and sort them into different folders under the Attachments folder.

Proposed solution

Enable opening and editing pdf’s from original location rather than take the whole thing and copy it into the vault.

Current workaround (optional)

No workaround there natively.

Related feature requests (optional)

A better Microsoft “Edge” pdf reader and editor, to have an all-rounded reading experience. Maybe make an Additional Fileview for the pdfs being used for a particular topic with one-tap links to open from original locations. And make obsidian remember the last page which was open in the pdf before closing.

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You don’t have to move files to the attachment folder.

You can link to PDFs or any other files stored externally. If on your SSD, for example, you can use:

[Name of PDF](file:///path/to/folder/thenfilename.pdf)

On a Mac:

  1. find the PDF (or other file) you want in the system’s Finder
  2. select it and drag it until it is over the Obsidian note where you want to create a link
  3. press the OPTION key
  4. release the dragged file while still holding down the Option key
  5. a link is created with the file name and the file’s original location
  6. release the Option key

Or [A PDF on a remote server](https://www.africau.edu/images/default/sample.pdf)

A PDF on a remote server

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This opens the pdf in the default pdf reader(for me it’s Microsoft Edge browser) which I don’t want.
I want to open the pdf and edit it in obsidian itself.

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