Share and collaborate on notes with other Obsidian users. For example, I’d like to be able to select individual notes or entire folders to share with my wife that we would both have access to from our individual vaults. Long-term I’d like to be able to select whether the receiver of the shared content has view or edit access.
Proposed solution
One option would be to follow the Google Drive approach. All shared files and folders would show in a sharing tab/menu and the user could add a shortcut to their main vault so they can organize the files or folders however they want to (just like the “add shortcut to drive” feature from Google).
This would allow users to easily share notes with each other without having to share entire vaults which is often unnecessary.
This could be an included feature for sync plans since our files are already being shared with Obsidian’s cloud.
As I explained, this is not the solution I am looking for. I would like to be able to share notes with other Obsidian users where we each have our own vault but have some content shared between them that we both have access to.
Why not synchronize your notes on Google Drive instead of Obsidian Sync ?
Obsidian is agnostic of the storage. You can edit your notes in Obsidian, have them synchronized on mobile/desktop with Google Drive, and share folders to other Google Drive users.
I would really like to see this feature added to sync. Live collaboration is the only thing mising from Obsidian for it to perfectly match my needs. Allowing notes or folders to be shared between vaults would be a big step toward this. (Sync is pretty quick and handle sync conflict well.) I’m using iCloud to have a shared folder with my girlfriend right now and it works, but it’s far from ideal.
Another interesting use is for people with multiple vault. I could see myself having a work vault and a personnal vault sharing a common core of notes including tasks lists, agenda, etc. That way, you can separate your personnal life from your professional life, but still keep notes important to both sync between the two vaults.
On Linux (and probably MacOS as well) you can use links to add any directory in your Drive (or wherever) into Obsidian vault. Simply copy a symbolic link from the directory and paste it into Obsidian vault. Obsidian then treats the directory as part of the vault while actually accessing and modifying files that are outside the vault.
Synchronization of a folder, though not so easy, seems to leave open the question of note links and attachements, unless we adopt strick policies: local attachments and no unbounded outgoing links.
This looks very possible under Synching I think (I’ve never used it in a multiuser context) Because it’s peer-to-peer you could set it up so each user has a copy of a shared vault and owns one folder in it where they place all their public notes, and changes are only propagated from the owner’s copy of that folder. You couldn’t directly edit anyone else’s notes, but you could post a new note in your own folder with a link back to it. That would appear as a backlink to anyone viewing a copy of the original note.
Hi Charle36! How do you share the folder with your girlfriend in iCloud? I’ve been trying to share my vault with my husband through using iCloud but it won’t let me share the Obsidian folder, and I don’t see how to create a vault from a different folder (aka the shared folder in iCloud).
The use case that I think many of us are interested in, that is not currently available:
Having vault sync back up and sync all of our files for ourselves
Being able to share specific files or directories with others for collaboration and having the ability for multiple users to sync those files
As I understand it, the current setup would be to either share your entire vault with another person, and if you didn’t want to share some things you would have to exclude them from being synced across your own devices as well.