This iS an old post, I know, but it’s still an ongoing requirement currently not handled in Obsidian natively.
To answer your question “why would attachments belonging to a note have a dedicated folder sitting along the note file”.
Because I don’t mind it, it help with my paranoia of notes getting lost because Obsidian seems to me (coming from Evernote) as a fragile geeky swiss-nife plain-text notes on steroids.
Anyhow, the IMPORTER plugin does exactly this - imports Evernote notes and puts attachments for each individual note from Evernote in a dedicated folder with the name matching the note name. So this is matter of consistency.
What am I supposed to do now? If I select any of the 3 only options available to manage attachments, it is going to be inconsistent with the original import.
To be honest, the only reason I went down into the rabbit hole of this hole thing is because I read somewhere - deleting notes will not remove attachments from the database… BAAM! … I need a plugin, do I trust it, what about if things run bad with REMOTELY SAVE and doing things from Android or iPhone, who knows what may happen, so I realized where am I going to look if there are issues that need manual fixing if things break. If I need to do that, where am I going to look for it.
So that is how that whole trip started for me.
I was looking for a smooth Evernote transition, which I got, import worked fine. And I could just carry on start using Obsidian without understanding how it works and later end with a mess like some people do when attempting to move manually attachments between folders.
Whatever the solution is, for a user coming from Evernote, I would expect:
- smooth experience (I move note and the rest is taken care of including attachments in the background)
- be able to manually navigate to the folder on the desktop (Finder, Explorer) with files and attachments and be able to see my markdown file there along with the attachments there nicely together. That gives me peace to my paranoia of having my notes safe.
I am more of that hierarchical approach for knowledge/reference management persona.
But I could also live with the fluid note-focused approach for Zettelkasten-style knowledge development persona if:
- all of attachments are consistent (so the IMPORTER plugin should also provide the choice of importing the attachment into the database with the expectation I am the Zettelkasten persona)
- All attachments should have the option to be auto-renamed so that their name includes the note name. This will allow the attachments to be sorted and found when looking for them manually in Finder / Exporer on Desktop.
I came from Evernote and I split my notes between Joplin and Obsidian since I want to run 2 separate databases for privacy reasons on different sets of computers and devices.
For me Joplin experience so far has been great, except for the PDF loading slower on notes and the sync being slower when using my own Dropbox/OneDrive (and not Joplin server). Obsedian is faster and renders PDFs well, sync is fast, but this attachment management got me off the track a bit. Still trying to figure out how to set it up. Because, to me it seems, once a choice is made, it’s hard to change later on and the plugins may not solve the mess.
How how I was struggling, you can see here, I had to consult ChatGPT to get my head around all the plugins:
And yet there seem to be a few more plugins now I am looking at like Attachment Management and Custom Attachment Location 