Disclaimer
Is this plugin open source? Yes
Is this plugin completely free? Yes
Is this plugin vibe-coded beyond the author’s ability to comprehend how it works? No
Community Directory: Link Peek
I made a plugin called Link Peek and it passed directory review today, so here it is.
When you hover an external link it shows a card with the page’s title, description, image and favicon, taken from the site’s OpenGraph tags. Move the mouse away and it’s gone. It works in Live Preview (including the folded [text](url) form, where the DOM doesn’t carry the URL, so the plugin reads the line’s source instead), Source mode, Reading view, and Canvas, both for link nodes and for links inside text nodes.
Why another link plugin: the link-card plugins I looked at are about turning a link into a card that lives in the note. I wanted the opposite, nothing written to the file, just a peek on hover. I came from Logseq, where logseq-plugin-link-preview did exactly this, and rebuilt the idea for Obsidian. Link Peek only renders. Disable it and your notes are what they were.
On privacy: the metadata request goes through Obsidian’s requestUrl straight to the site you’re hovering. There’s no preview API in the middle and no key to set up. Results are cached in the plugin’s data.json for a week by default (configurable), failures are retried after an hour, and you can exclude domains in settings.
Install from the community plugin browser (search “Link Peek”; it may take an hour or two to show up there after today’s publish) or with BRAT using iam1maker/obsidian-link-peek.
I haven’t tested on mobile at all, and I’m not sure hover is even the right interaction on a phone. If you try it there, I’d like to hear what happens.