Hey guys. This is my first showcase on the Obsidian forums. I have been working on a plugin called Vault Explorer.
Vault Explorer is a plugin that leverages frontmatter properties to help you explore and organize your vault files.
The goal of Vault Explorer is to solve three main problems:
How to easily filter by groups of frontmatter properties and other file data.
How to display frontmatter properties in meaningful visual layouts.
How to create a social media-like experience using just your personal data.
I personally use Vault Explorer to manage all of my links, like a bookmark manager. In addition, I use it to create collections of notes that are filtered by frontmatter rules. I have filter groups such as: vision, activity, review, and feedback.
Get started with the plugin at:
If you guys have any feedback, I would love to hear any suggestions.
Very cool! I’ve created a list of books read, authors and recipes in my vault within a minute just to see how it works and what can or cannot be done. I have a fair amount of metadata for some note types like books and the ability to filter by any of them easily has me giddy
Questions: for some reason images embedded in the note are not recognized at all. When I link to them in front-matter, it works, but book covers are the opposite of wide and short in grid view and they end up showing the middle of the cover. Any way to fit the entire cover in grid view?
Also, none of the views recognize any tags. Does it read only those in frontmatter?
Thanks for the feed Naranya! For cover image loading, I need to fix a few bugs. I drafted a better implementation today that I will release in the next day or two. That will fix the issue with loading links from the body of a markdown file.
No, currently there is not a way from the plugin to change the fit of the cover image. That is something that needs to be added. I have noted that.
If you would like to change it using css, you could create a snippet. Copy the code and place in a file in the <vault>/.obsidian/snippets folder.
I have had bad experiences with plugins changing my data as well. Does Vault Explorer change your data? Short answer: sometimes.
Right now the only operation that changes data is when you add a markdown file to the favorites list. For example, if you added a markdown file to the favorites list, a favorites property would be inserted into the frontmatter or an existing property would be updated to be true.
There may be more operations that change your files in the file, but these will all be operations that the user initiates.
For general usage though, no, nothing is changed. Filter settings are saved into the settings.json file of the plugin. And non-markdown file favorites are saved into a favorites.json file.
I just released the new cover image loading system in 1.37.0 and loading tags from the body of a markdown note in 1.38.0. Please update and try it out!
Thanks, it loads both images and tags from the note itself now.
One note: it does not recognize images within callouts (I use multi-column plugin to put cover and short description side by side), but that is as far as I can tell general Obsidian limitation, not recognizing links, images, etc. within callouts when searching. I’ll just link those book covers in frontmatter.
Love this plug-in. It’s like Dataview light for us non-coders
I just played with this for a minute or two, and it looks fantastic. I’ve been hoping for something like this since Properties was introduced. Very nice!
