Properties update broke my meta tags

[mahestro]

Hello there,

I noticed that the properties addition to obsidian is conflicting with meta tags I add to my documents, therefore the searchability is affected as well as the tagging.

Obsidian doesn’t recognize the tag properties, but they are present if I open the files with another editor.

This is how my files look in a text editor: Monosnap

I’ve been using this system since the early times of obsidian. Now with the properties update, I’m missing my tags.

This is how it looks in obsidian: Monosnap

Is there a workaround to fix this?

Any advice is much appreciated on this topic. I feel frustrated because I may lose sensitive data from years of work.

Thanks!

[ariehen]

A hash, # , in YAML is a comment, so Obsidian isn’t going to read that as a tag.

Both →

---
tags: burgers, buns
---

and →

---
tags: [pickles, ketchup]
---

still work, but if you use the Properties UI, the YAML will be reformatted into a multi-line array:

---
tags:
  - cheese
  - bacon
---

As of now, you can use the top two versions and they will be recognized as tags by Obsidian. The third won’t be.

---
tags:
  - valid-tag1
  - "#valid-tag2"
  - #invalid-tag
---

There are a few Feature Requests to add more options when using tags in YAML if you search for “Properties” and “tags”.

[mahestro]

Hi @ariehen, thank you for taking the time to review my situation here.

If I understand correctly, all I can do is manually update all my files to use the “tags: -tagname” format?

And last, may I know what do you mean by “but if you use the Properties UI”? Is it possible to bypass this UI? If so, I’d love to since I have tons of files that I would have to update and it would be time-consuming.

[gino_m]

@mahestro

have to update and it would be time-consuming.

If you search on the forum for VSCode, search and replace, etc. you’ll likely find posts where people talk about updating tags, various data or metadata en masse outside of Obsidian.
They will also talk about regular expressions.