Geotags/Time-geography Plugin

Another user on Reddit suggested that I port our request(s) here.

We were both hoping to see a potential plugin that incorporates geotags or some of the principles of time geography into Obsidian.

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It’d be pretty neat to have this graph view available alongside your daily notes to create a visualization of your movements in space and time.

Creating your own autobiographies or recreating historical events/sequences would be an incredible tool to see inside Obsidian.

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As a geographer, I like this idea and I appreciate your introducing me to time geography!

Without tackling the idea of time geography (yet), are you primarily looking for something to:

  1. map multiple notes as individual location points, or
  2. map multiple items from a single note

For item 1, I’m imagining it something like Day One’s map view of journal entries:

This looks to be generally possible already with the obsidian-leaflet-plugin (github/forum).

There is opportunity to expand on this plugin (or create a new one) to have an “add my current location to this note’s frontmatter” function (either manually or automatically on note creation) and a dedicated pane to show a map view of your notes (as opposed to showing them on a map embedded into a separate note). It would be great to have a map view of notes that’s as integrated as file explorer or graph view. I believe this would also answer @esm90’s request.

@valentine.195, would you want to tackle this :point_up_2: in your plugin, or do you feel it’s out of scope? If you’re not interested, I’ve already got my wheels spinning on the idea.

Item 2 can also be accomplished with obsidian-leaflet-plugin.

It sounds like the OP in the reddit post was looking for item 1. Do you have other use cases than my two items?


Time geography visualizations sound very interesting and also very complex. Like combining obsidian-day-planner with a map. My gut feeling for visualizing space and time in Obsidian would be a 2D map with an animation or slider to show changing time. It may not be ideal for some use cases, but I imagine it being easier to build, with more packages/libraries to take advantage of.

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I personally don’t think that the (great) obsidian-leaflet-plugin is a good direction for my request. This plugin offers a map view in a note’s preview mode. It’s great in what it does and should remain this way.
As you suggested, we need a separate tool to give a meta view of the locations embedded in notes. Somewhat similar to graph view, but with a map rather than a graph (leaflet-js can still power the map part).

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There is opportunity to expand on this plugin (or create a new one) to have an “add my current location to this note’s frontmatter” function (either manually or automatically on note creation)

Playing around with it, I’m not sure if this would be possible. It appears Obsidian does not have a Chromium API Key with geolocation information enabled, unfortunately, as the Geolocation namespace is returning a “no response received” error. I could grab location information using an IP location lookup but that location could be wildly inaccurate (for example, this website’s returned location is about 10 miles south of me). If anyone knows of a better way to get current position, though, I’d be happy to integrate this - wouldn’t be hard.

dedicated pane to show a map view of your notes (as opposed to showing them on a map embedded into a separate note).

As you suggested, we need a separate tool to give a meta view of the locations embedded in notes. Somewhat similar to graph view, but with a map rather than a graph (leaflet-js can still power the map part).

This would be doable for this plugin, and is relatively doable now, just (as you said) in a separate note and not a pane such as the graph view. I added a feature to point a map to a folder of notes, so that when you enter preview mode it reads the frontmatter of the notes (included nested notes) in that folder and builds markers out of them if they have location: [latitude, longitude] in their front matter.

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Ah dang. I haven’t done any plugin work for Obsidian (or any electron development, for that matter); I was hoping one could easily tap into the standard Geolocation API.

Yeah, that’s what I was trying to use.

From what I can find online about it, Chrome ships with an internal API key that allows use of the google geolocation API. Electron’s Chromium does not, and you have to add a developer key that has this enabled, and there isn’t a free tier.

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