Recording creation and revision dates in the metadata for a note

One of the many nice things about Bear is the metadata that it automatically records for a note and makes available for easy viewing.

Please see the attached screenshot.

I find this very useful and was wondering if this is something that would be considered as a feature request for Obsidian.

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I imagine your OS saves created dates and last modified dates anyway, so really this is just the ability to see that metadata in Obsidian, yes?

I think it a little cool. but I can’t say if it is useful.

maybe I will want it.

@ryanjamurphy

I forgot the OS was doing that :slight_smile:

It would make it more convenient to see it in Obsidian but if really need then yes, could observe the dates in the file system.

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One problem is the file creation date does not necessarily equal to the note creation date.
Bear stores it in a SQLite database, instead of using the file modification date.

I’d suggest storing the date in the YAML front matter, similar to that in Jekyll.

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That would be a great little plugin. Just to show the file metadata at some place like the word count plugin.

Here’s my workaround:

Ideally, it would be nice to have “created” and “changed” values built into Obsidian as front matter.

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created as YAML has pro’s and con’s.
Pro: When importing a note created from elsewhere, one could easily maintain the original creation date.
Con: created could accidentally be changed or lost. This wouldn’t be a catastrophic error for the app, since the app could always default to the file’s creation date for created; but, it could be an issue for a user who wants to somehow protect created value.

Are there write-protected YAML, which could be altered only after a warning/alert? I imagine not.

I am slowly moving over from Evernote to Obsidian. Contextual metadata is important to me so: Created, Modified viewable, searchable, etc is useful. Seems like this should be possible via a plugin.

Additional would be device created, and location data.

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Hi I’m interested in doing this too! Has your workaround changed since then?

Create and modify date should live in the YAML frontmatter as the OS provided values are very unreliable.
Moving a file or restoring from a backup could change the create and modify date, where as a text in the note would require a user or a plugin to actively change it.

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Just to check in with the community for any updates.

Is there now a way to add DATE CREATED in YAML front matter?

there isn’t an official/quasi-official way to manage dates by frontmatter, right?
also calender plugin uses file.date
i’m currently adding date to every post/note… hoping some day there’ll be an official fieldname and format

I was just searching for the same thing. I haven’t yet tried this out myself, but I’ll be taking a look at obsidian-linter/rules.md at master · platers/obsidian-linter · GitHub, which inserts both creation and modification dates into the frontmatter, in addition to other features.

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