Can someone confirm that we still cannot embed a pdf that lives on a networked drive?
I do it all the time with images and youtube videos, but I just tried pdf and it didn’t work.
I know about pdf++ but would prefer an obsidian native solution.
Yes. As of August 2026, Obsidian still cannot natively embed a PDF that is outside the current vault, including a PDF reached through a local/network-drive path.
The current Obsidian documentation is quite explicit: the embed mechanism is for a “file in your vault”, and the documented PDF syntax is:
![[Document.pdf]]
![[Document.pdf#page=3]]
So something such as:
or
does not invoke Obsidian’s native PDF viewer. You can make a file:///… link to an external PDF and open it, but you can’t transclude it into the note using native functionality. A 2024 Obsidian forum answer states exactly this for a PDF outside the vault, and the corresponding feature request for external-file transclusion still exists.
Why images work but PDFs don’t
That’s an actual inconsistency in Obsidian, rather than something wrong with your syntax.
Obsidian explicitly supports external images:
<>
and external/local image resources can be rendered using normal HTML/Markdown image handling. The official documentation specifically documents external images separately.
PDFs, however, are displayed using Obsidian’s PDF viewer, effectively an iframe/viewer environment. Obsidian only wires that viewer up to vault resources. Network resources have additional Electron/iframe security restrictions as well. This has been acknowledged by Obsidian developers in the past.
YouTube is yet another mechanism: it’s a web resource embedded through web/iframe functionality, so it doesn’t imply that arbitrary external PDFs should work.
Unfortunately there seems no proper native solution or workaround for this problem. My own experience with workarounds (and I have tried many) is not great. When I found something to work on one system, it most certainly failed to work on others (e.g. ok on Windows → nope on Android). I finally gave up on the idea a while ago - and as it seems things are not really moving.
One method is to use symbolic links.
Symlink the topmost folder of your PDF’s to your vault (anywhere, basically, no need to put the symlink in the attachments folder, either). Preferably do not include any folders underneath that contain very many small files like I did once in the past… ONLY folders and PDFs (or the occasional epub and DJVU etc.) files should be there. No system files, index files, or any smut.
On first reload of Obsidian, the app takes them onboard, so if you have 20k PDF’s, it will be a bit slow starting up, but not on the 2nd run.
From that point onward, enjoy your PDF’s inside the app.
Good thing is the PDF’s are not physically in your vault so your sync quota will not be burdened but make sure you check that first before syncing (depending on your sync method; I don’t know Obsidian Sync, for instance)…
Edited typos.
Yes, on some systems this works, but if you want this synched on different devices and operating systems you run into so many problems that - at least for me - it’s not worth the hassle.
Hmm, I don’t remember running into problems. I just made another symlink alongside the first one from the other OS (Linux in my case).
Bottom line is:
- Don’t expect i(Pad)OS functionality when creating a Windows/etc symlink.
- Try to stick to one platform where most of your other programs operate. Yeah, Windows still wins out over Linux, and if one owns a Mac, go all in on that. But otherwise, one symlink for each platform. Linux Obsidian will not make use of the Windows symlink and vice versa.
Thanks for the confirmation.
Thank you also to others who offered the symbolic link workaround.