I am a cinematographer. I do around 4 or 5 jobs a month. They always involve lots of photos, gifs, video file references and a lot of excel spreadsheets and pdfs of location and styling decks.
I love obsidian but currenlty I seem to be running two paralllel systems. A windows file structure synced in nextcloud / dropbox of all the above and then an obsidian vault with just the relevant “obsidian” compatible files synced using obsidian sync.
What problems will I encounter if I just make an obsidian vault out of my main windows structure. Ok Ill lose mobile access but it would be nice to just be able to have mountains of video files and notes available in an obsidian layout. Not having the obsidian sync limitations would be nice too.
I am going to start trying it out but I’d be interested what got’ya s I should be looking out for?
That should work OK. You can still access and work with your notes on mobile by using another text editor or Markdown app (iA Writer on iOS is nice and supports wikilinks and searching across files, tho it’s pricey). It is also possible to use Obsidian with those sync systems on mobile via the Remotely Save community plugin, but it will copy everything to the device, which might not be desirable if video files are involved.
I routinely put Microsoft Office documents in my Obsidian vault. I have been doing this for years. It works fine. I sync with Obsidian Sync.
Your files will be a million times larger than mine — I think literally a million! — which might cause problems.
A fancy trick I’m just starting to play with: Store Office and other non-Obsidian-compatible documents in a single folder, and then create a markdown document for each. Add whatever Properties I want, and the body of the markdown document is just a link to the non-Obsidian document.
I have an Obsidian vault for each of my book series/worlds. They are full of graphics, videos, research materials in pdfs, etc. as well as my Obsidian markdown notes. Works great!
Yeah, I have a Mac mini syncing with nextcloud and with obsidian sync active to my phone. So far so good
I wish there was an option to only sync media if it’s linked into a document. So random files unless they are linked in a .md file don’t sync to my phone.
going to vibe code something later today that’ll look at my vault and replace video files with the nextcloud public share link that way obsidian publisher works and potentially a lightweight option works on my phone if I turn off sharing the actual docs.
My linking from Markdown “wrapper notes” to Word and other non-Markdown documents is simple and low-tech: I create a markdown note — “Thomas’s document doc.md”, include whatever Properties I want to include, and then add a link the body of the note, in double-bracket, to the original document. The original document lives in an “assets” subfolder with other non-Markdown documents for a common project or area.
The body of the markdown note contains a link to the non-Markdown document, and only that one link .
is there a way of having a folder wildcard like _unsync* so _unsyncRAWRUSHES folder won’t sync to my phone? or is there any other way of denoting folders not to sync. If I manually go in to Sync Settings and select Media folder in project it’ll be like 80 long by xmas.
Actually I realise maybe there is an option in nextcloud to wildcard not sync folders. You see I am syncing all my computers by nextcloud including a macmini and that macmini has obsidian sync to my phone.
in other news I vibe coded a little thing that makes nextcloud links to all the media if its embedded so thats working nicely with publish.
Obsidian Sync doesn’t have an option like that. The closest you can get is to have them all in a parent folder and exclude that (which I realize probably doesn’t work with your project structure).
You’ll generally have better luck with questions like this by giving them their own post in Help where more people will see them.