Is it worth organizing images in obsidian?
I’m a little intrigued by images since I see that other users usually create a folder called attachment then make some settings and put the images that one automatically puts there without giving it a name and leave it as is and leave it with the name Pasted image 2024......,
But shouldn’t you be careful with the file name?
I think that images are just as important as notes since sometimes they provide us with information in a more edible way.
Well, I’ve thought about giving a kind of format to the images that I’ve been importing in the following way: Pasted image 2024...... → img descriptive_name aditional_info format
Where the format refers to the format in which the information was found
B → book
W → web
Yt → youtube
M → Me
For example, I may have been interested in an image of the four elements which I saw in Aristotle’s Metaphysics book, then it would be imported in this way:
“img four_elements Aristotle’s Metaphysics B”
But on the other hand, this can make the image import process a little slower.
The “Pasted” name only happens if you are copy/pasting images in. But if you import an image that already has a name, it keeps the name.
Depending on your OS, there may be tools that can help with automatic formatting and editing of screenshots. I use Alfred on MacOS, and I have a workflow that changes the resolution, saves a file into a custom ~/screenshots folder, and also copies the image info to my clipboard. Or you could make it write the file straight to your vault attachments, and then copy some kind of custom Markdown template.
There might also be some community plugins for managing images. “Paste image rename”, “Paste image Png to Jpeg”, “Image Collector”, etc. etc. (never tried them.)
Is it worth it? If that organization is worth it to you, that’s all that counts! I think it would definitely help a lot when you are browsing your data from the OS directly, or copying info into other databases later.
Organizing vaults is entirely a personal preference. For myself, I don’t bother to organize images that are dragged into illustrate or decorate a given note as part of the context of that note – these images are never reused somewhere else, and so I don’t need to find them again.
But, I do have folders of images that I use for banners on daily notes – these images are often reused to set the mood for a day, and I want to find them based on words in the file name, so I am careful to name with.
It’s a matter of preference. Personally I dislike the default “Pasted” names (but I don’t normally add images by pasting, so it doesn’t affect me much). For images that belong to projects, I put them in the project folder. Others going the main attachments folder, which I may organize with subfolders at some point.
On mac terminal you can use pngpaste command to rename pasted images. This workflow is similar to using Paste image rename community plugin.
Alternative option in mac is clipboard history in Raycast. By default ⌥⇧⌘S saves images to files in clipboard history view. You can query clipboard history by media type (text, images etc) and by text content, including OCR from images.