iOS Share Sheet: Full Text capture fails or produces unusable titles for Facebook and Instagram
Steps to reproduce
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On iPhone, open Facebook or Instagram.
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Open a post containing a caption/description.
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Tap Share and select Obsidian from the iOS Share Sheet.
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Select a Location configured as:
- Behavior: New Note
- Template: None
- Link capture: Full Text
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Save the shared content as a new note.
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Observe the generated title and note content.
I can reproduce this in a new local/on-device Obsidian vault.
I also tested the same workflow using the URL capture option for comparison.
Did you read and follow the Troubleshooting Guide? [Yes]
Expected result
When Full Text capture is selected, the Share Sheet should capture usable text/content from the shared Facebook or Instagram post and create a note that can be reviewed, edited, and saved.
The generated note title should remain reasonably short and valid as an Obsidian filename.
Actual result
With Full Text capture, the results differ between Facebook and Instagram but are unusable in both cases.
Facebook:
- essentially none of the post text is captured;
- in my testing, only a single word from the name of the Facebook profile/account that published the post was captured.
Instagram:
- a large amount of text is captured, but it is placed in the note title rather than the note body;
- the generated title can contain line breaks/newline-like formatting;
- with such content in the title, the note cannot be saved successfully from the Share Sheet.
For longer Instagram posts, the title also becomes too large to usefully edit within the Share Sheet.
By comparison, changing the same Location to URL capture works substantially better on both Facebook and Instagram.
However, I encountered at least one Facebook post where URL capture produced malformed Markdown/link formatting. Part of the captured title/content appeared to introduce bullet/list-like formatting inside the generated link, causing normally hidden Markdown syntax and the URL itself to become visible. I have not yet determined which character in the source data triggered this.
Environment
SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: 1.13.7 (365)
API version: 1.13.7
Operating system: iOS 18.6.2 (Apple iPhone12,1)
Login status: not logged in
Language: en
Live preview: on
Base theme: adapt to system
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: on
RECOMMENDATIONS:
none
Source apps tested:
- Facebook v576.0.0
- Instagram v444.0.0
Obsidian 1.13.7 is the latest version currently available to me through the iOS App Store.
Additional information
This appears related to the new iOS Share Sheet introduced with Obsidian 1.13, which added configurable Locations and Full Text capture from web pages, YouTube, and social networks.
Before the Obsidian 1.13 Share Sheet update, this workflow was not perfect, but the generated titles were generally much shorter and the notes could be saved.
There was already a related title-handling issue in the previous workflow: text imported from Facebook/Instagram—particularly social-media account names—could contain characters that were not safely handled for Obsidian filenames/wikilinks. This is not the main regression reported here, but because it concerns title generation in the same sharing workflow, it may be worth addressing at the same time.
For comparison, the new Share Sheet has substantially improved capture of some other content. For example, long YouTube transcripts / AI-generated summaries can now be captured much more successfully. This suggests that the current problem may be specific to how metadata/content supplied by certain social-media apps is interpreted.
As a separate enhancement suggestion, it would also be very useful to have a capture option that preserves both the extracted Full Text and the original source URL in the resulting note. I understand that the current Share Sheet exposes Full Text and URL as alternative capture modes, so this is not required to reproduce the bug above and could be handled separately as a feature request if preferred.