I can drag a PDF and embed it on a note, looks gorgeous on preview, it’s exactly what I want but I do have my own local folders with PDFs sorted in a way that makes sense to my research and I don’t want copies going to Obsidian folder when I drag them there, what can I do?
I tried embedding, using iframe, file://path/file.pdf, even a symlink to a local file copied to Obsidian folder doesn’t work as well (I’m on a Mac)
Sole solution I can think of is to move the obsidian vault folder to my PDFs folder root, as then all my PDFs and the vault would share the same parent. Can I do this? And if I can, is there any way to “hide” my PDF subfolders from other Obsidian folders on the File Explorer panel?
Give this format a whirl: 
Keep in mind, it will not render (it will show as a placeholder) if the vault is shared on another machine that does not have authorization to view that folder.
As I understand, the pdf folder will not work as a sibling of the obsidian vault, but only as a child, i.e. as a folder below your obsidian root. And if you have many pdfs, obsidian will get a bad performance. I tried it with several 10k files and failed…
This works for me: Create a symlink of your pdf parent folder and place it in your vault. This single symlink gives you access from inside obsidian to all files below it.
This works for me: Create a symlink of your pdf parent folder and place it in your vault. This single symlink gives you access from inside obsidian to all files below it.
Thank you so much. This was a very elegant and simple solution!
I wrongly assumed folders would behave the same as files (and I’ve tried that,) but nope, folder symlinks do work to embed local PDFs into my notes, 100% solves my problem. Gosh, Obsidian is so awesome and it just got better, thanks everyone, thank you Mr. Boomer