Exclude folders from search

It would be nice to be able to exclude certain folders within the Vault from the search function.

At present, I have created a Vault in the “root” of my documents-folder, where all of my files are organized following the PARA method (in folders named 1. Projects, 2. Areas, 3. Resources and 4. Archive). That works great, except for the fact that I have a folder structure consisting of unorganized files within the “4. Archive”-folder (my old, unorganized files). When searching within Obsidian, all these unorganized files are included in the search, causing both clutter and a slow search.

I could of course move the old files, but that would mess up my overall file storage organisation (which I am hoping to combine seemlessly with my Obsidian Vault).

In any case, great software!

12 Likes

this is possible with the revamped search

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Care to link to how?

Found!
path:-“Daily notes”

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FWIW this uses the curly quotes for some reason. Use normal quotes and it’ll work.

path:-"Archive"

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do you know how to exclude multiple paths without doing path:-"Archive", path:-"Archive2", path:-"Archive3" ?

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For me, it works: “Your search” -path:“The path you want to exclude”

Example, I search any tag #Cereal, except in the folder “Time to get”:
tag:#Cereal -path:“Time to get”

In fact, it will exclude any folder which has the text “Time to get”

Hope it helps,

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Is it possible to config obsidian to always ignore some folders? I use a folder called images to store the illustrations for notes, and it’ll be great if we can just ignore these images when searching for notes.

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You can create a search to exclude those folders. Then star that search. Then revise that starred search each time you want to search for notes

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Is it possible to exclude certain folders from “quick open dialog cmd+O” and link hints?

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I’d like this too. I’d like the “templates” folder to be ignored.

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