Dealing with iphone screenshots huge file size, syncing

Not sure if this is the proper place for this post, but if anyone has any insight into this issue let me know:

I communicate to myself frequently through taking screenshots on my phone. these tend to pile into my camera roll on my phone.

As I’ve started to use obsidian I thought it would be cool idea to import my screenshots into obsidian for processing, as most could be converted into a string of text, what I found interesting or worth saving in the image.

But each screenshot from my iPhone is like 2-5mb, which adds up quick. I don’t want to sync like a gigabyte of photos between my phone and my two computers whenever I sync my obsidian vault.

Any thoughts or ideas on how to tackle this issue?

1 Like

After you type whatever is interesting about the image into Obsidian, do you even need the photo to be in the vault?

If so, another option would be to use something like Shortcuts to reduce the size of the screenshot image to 25%, which makes the file size much smaller (~250KB) for the tradeoff of being less sharp.

Here’s a simple outline of an iOS Shortcut that might work for you:

  • Select photos
  • Resize Photos by Percentage 25%
  • Share Resized Image

Running this shortcut, you’ll be asked to pick a photo/screenshot, and then you’ll be brought to a share sheet. Choose Obsidian, and it will open and ask if you want to import the .png file to your vault, and then ask if you want to include a link to it in the currently opened note.

2 Likes

This is a great workaround, thank you!