How can Obsidian's image management be made more flexible?

[Thor007]

Hello everyone,

I’m facing a challenge with managing my images on my PC, which I want to make easily accessible via Obsidian. So far, I’ve been using the “Image Gallery” plugin, which facilitates the creation of aesthetic galleries.

View of the gallery in the note:

View of the gallery when clicking on an image:

It’s really pretty, however, this plugin limits the selection of images to the use of a single folder path, which complicates the classification according to different criteria like style, subject, or action depicted.

Currently, to organize my images, I am forced to simplify the sorting architecture, avoiding sub-folders to prevent the creation of duplicates. Thus, for my part, I sort only based on the style of the image to organize them (right now, it’s just a test gallery).

For example, an image depicting a woman from behind in a field and styled in Pop Art would require the creation of multiple folders for each criterion—“Subject-woman”, “Style-pop-art”, “Location-field”, “Angle-view-from-behind”. Each of these four criteria, combined together, can generate up to 15 different folder paths, all leading to the same images, thus creating a significant number of duplicates on my PC.

The problem is also that each of these possible folder paths represents a different search intention.

The intention behind this search: Subject-woman/Style-pop-art/location-field/angle-view-from-behind.

Is not the same as this one: Style-pop-art/Subject-woman/angle-view-from-behind/location-field.

Yet, they lead to the same result.

Ideally, I would like to be able to directly assign tags to images or apply YAML frontmatter. This would allow filtering images in a single gallery based on various configurable criteria such as style, location, color, time, shooting angle, emotion, etc., via a search bar at the top of the gallery.

Despite the pleasant aesthetics of the current gallery, this organization is impractical and I am looking for solutions to improve this system.

Do you have any suggestions or recommendations on how to integrate such a feature, or are there alternative plugins that can meet these needs? Thank you in advance for your advice and help.

Best regards.

[blue_emperor]

Obsidian doesn’t offer image‑based search results display so you are expected to look for textual information along with page preview and Settings–>Core plugins–>Page preview–> toggle off “require cmd/ctrl to trigger page preview on hover” from “search, backlinks and outgoing links”. Obviously that doesn’t solve your problem because you want graphical search results display. You might be interested in Omnisearch community plugin.

In mac you can use finder’s gallery view to display search results graphically. Mac also offers tags for any files. Depending on your use case you could apply tags to images and perform search queries in Finder and then use option+drag or drag to create image links in Obsidian. In Obsidian you could re-apply tags to images if you plan to combine search in Finder and Obsidian. Just make a md‑file containing your image along with properties. That might be a lot of extra work in your use case which means you could perform image searches only in Finder and use Obsidian for other work.