[Bug] Drag-n-Drop to iCloud folder on Mac

Platform

[x] iOS
[x] Mac
[ ] Android

Obsidian Mobile version: v0.0.15


A known issue, just adding this for tracking purposes. @ryanjamurphy has been helping to troubleshoot and resolve.

Problem: You can’t drag-n-drop a file from the mac to the iCloud Drive Obsidian vault.

Current workaround: copy/paste the file seems to work.

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Thanks for capturing this. Indeed, Licat and I have been chatting about this for a week or so. It has been a nuisance to solve!

I think this is a bug caused by how Obsidian’s declaring what file types are compatible with its iCloud Drive app library (i.e., the Obsidian folder in iCloud Drive).

The bug also has other effects: you can’t save items into the vault from other apps, either, for example. So, if you are in a Word doc and you want to save it to an iCloud Drive vault, you have to save it to e.g., the desktop then copy and paste.

You see similar behavior if you try to save incompatible files into other iCloud Drive app libraries. For instance, try saving a .jpeg into the Numbers app library.

If anyone out there has experience with app development on iCloud Drive and CFBundleTypes, reach out!

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Kind of related, but why limit vault to be inside Obsidian’s folder in iCloud Drive? In theory it should be possible to point the app to any non-app-specific folder in iCloud Drive, like Documents/MyVault.

I think Licat’s working on that, but it’s non-trivial. Still, fingers crossed/stay tuned!

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Tell that to all the Devs who are currently trying to point their apps to the Obsidian specific folder in iCloud AND retain their full feature offerings.

So glad I found this! At least this is known. I thought it was something permission related on my end.

And it’s been causing issues on the iOS end particularly with the recent option to open file in default app which uses iOS Share Sheet. With a PDF, using that command gives access to the built-in annotation using Apple Pencil but after annotating, it kept asking me to save as that file somewhere else. Even though I could still pick the vault from the iOS file picker, it still ended up creating a duplicate I’m guessing because of this bug only.

However, using the same share sheet, I could open the PDF in Documents 5(by Readdle) and after annotating using that app, I could just save over the existing file. So there’s something weird going on that a third party app could write inside Obsidian’s Vault but neither iOS can nor can macOS (only drag drop though).

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I am also having this issue. I found it while trying to use a web clipper plugin, which is unable to write to the Obsidian folder in iCloud drive, so it doesn’t work. I have to save the file elsewhere and copy/paste it into the Obsidian folder. Pretty annoying…

Fixed in 0.12.10. You need to download and reinstall Obsidian.

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