Newbie questions - attachments how to deal with them

Different software may work differently. It is important that you understand how the software of your choice works. These differences also make that seamless transition from one system to another is not always fluent.

Obsidian in principle operates without the need for a folder structure. Obsidian does not assume where your attachment lives: it identifies files and attachmentsby their unique name. Only when in a vault multiple files with the same name exist, a path is required for disambiguation. So preferred practice in Obsidian is to attempt to work with unique file names.

So I set the default folder in configuration to attachments and I tried to move the files to attachments folder by moving the notes within Obsidian.

Fail.

It does not work like this as I explained above. Obsidian retrieves attachments through the file name, so moving a note will not move the attachment. In reverse, you can move the attachment, it will still be found by the note.

Now all pdfs and pictures show broken link (still pointing to _resources folder).
Ugh…

That happens if many of the files have the same name, so need to be referenced by their path as well.

So question… how to move the photos and pdfs from _resources to attachments and what plugins do I need to use?

  • The easiest way to move the files will be in your operating systems’s file manager. I actually suggest to at first rename the"_resources" folders to “attachments”.

  • Then, you can easily update the links to these attachments by a global search for “_resources” and global change to “attachments”. You can use the " Global Search and Replace" plugin from within Obsidian, or external tools like a text editor that supports global search/replace over various files (e.g. VSCode) or command line utilities like “sed”.