#1

Hello Obsidian friends,

So I’m still trying to optimise quick capture within obsidian (through desktop or mobile) and still have some gaps that need some help. For the bulk of it, I’m using Readwise:

  • Tweets, Highlights from articles, Kindle highlights, Shortform highlights… → Readwise → Automatically synced into Obsidian.

What I have some friction with are two:

  • Youtube capture

  • PDF capture

I’d like to be able to highlight and capture them very quickly without too much fumbling around with copying and pasting.

Currently for youtube, I use QuickAdd, but that involves me pasting the link, typing the video title, and so forth - too much friction, not enough speed.

For PDFs, I’ve been using external PDF apps, highlighting them, exporting via markdown, such as using Polar, or even native PDF apps. On mobile, I use Moon+ Reader which syncs to Readwise, so that’s fine - but for desktop work, this is pretty hard.

Anyone can share their PDF and Youtube workflows? Hopefully for youtube it also involves some kind of timestamp annotation or some kind of way to store comments or transcriptions too.

1 Like
#2

I feel your pain… I’ve stopped consuming PDFs, just knowing Readwise’s Reader will let me annotate and import from PDFs… any day now…

For your YouTube capture, there’s an Auto Link Title plugin that will take the URL and grab the title for you… Might save a step if no one else has a better workflow.

1 Like
#3

@syncretizm:

Youtube notes: I really like working with Yinotes (I use the Chrome Plugin). It opens a pane with an editor. As soon as you start typing, the video stopps and a timestamp is added to the editor. The notes can be exported as Markdown.

Youtube transcripts: I don’t need transcripts very often. But there is a 3 point menu unter the video ..., with the option “open Transcript”. Every few words, the transcript contains timestamps. If you want to copy the transcript without the timestamps in beween, in the ... menu you can hide them. Hope this helps.

2 Likes
#4

I capture PDFs in Zotero, and read with my regular PDF viewer. Highlights and notes get captured by a Zotero plugin and transferred into my Obsidian notes.