#1

Greetings,

I’d like to move from proprietary note taking systems such as OneNote to Evernote to a more universal one, and Markdown files may be the best solution.

So handling files such as multimedia (even videos) and other heavy files, Office files, PDFs is mandatory in my note taking system.

How do you handle such files on Obsidian?

Do you embed these files inside the note?
Do you keep these files separate, and simply refer to them in the note?
What else?

Any tip or feedback is welcome.

BTW: I’m looking for a system suitable on mobile too, since I’m always on the road with iPhone and iPad.

Thank you!

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#2

Hello and Welcome to the community!

I’d like to move from proprietary note taking systems such as OneNote to Evernote to a more universal one, and Markdown files may be the best solution.

Obsidian is the right choice, then. I was after the same things. Future proofed, secure and offline.

How do you handle such files on Obsidian?
Do you embed these files inside the note?
Do you keep these files separate, and simply refer to them in the note?

You can embed certain file formats. Others get stored as an attachment in a folder that you can specify in settings. All in all, it handles it well and I have had no issues in the regard.

Any tip or feedback is welcome.

The help vault usually has a ton of tips and answer to most of the questions one might have at first. If you need help you with any doubt, you can ask the community here or on discord.

I highly recommend this playlist by Nick Milo to get started.

You can check out his Starter Kit pinned to the Knowledge Management Section of this forum as well if you want to dive in deeper. I can not recommend it enough. Though I would suggest you try it after you use Obsidian for a while first.

BTW: I’m looking for a system suitable on mobile too, since I’m always on the road with iPhone and iPad.

You can sync the md files of your vault via any cloud service. You can use any markdown text editor apps like iAWriter on your phone to access and edit your notes.

Thanks.

#3

I would add to Ascendis, that some files - like office-files - are not really handled within Obisidan at the moment: you cant embed them or link to them in any meaningfull way (I am happy to be corrected). It seems to be a regularly uttered request in the forums to add something in this respect.
Right now, it seems, PDF, some picture formats and sound files can be embedded/linked to. More can be done - it seems - with iframe (which for now goes over my head).
I would also add, that the forum is also a really good ressource to get help and insight about technical stuff as well as knowledge-management schemes and workflow-suggestions.

#4

I believe you can link to arbitrary files using the file:// scheme, e.g. [myfile.xyz](file:///path/to/myfile.xyz). Clicking the link will open the file in whatever the default program is.

It’s cumbersome to write these links however, and using absolute paths leads to issues if using it on multiple computers. I wrote a short Alfred (macOS only) Workflow that allows you to select a file in finder, trigger the workflow, and it will copy [myfile.xyz](file:///path/to/myfile.xyz) to your clipboard.

P.S. posted from phone, pardon any mistakes in links or formatting.

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