Obsidian yesterday released the 1.4 update, available only to Insiders for now, introducing a feature that they’re calling Properties.
Based on YAML metadata, which has always been a feature of the app, now adding certain metadata properties in your notes is more feature-rich and accessible.
This article’s going to go over the changes and upgrades, as well as the new features that this brings to metadata (or properties) in Obsidian. I’m also going to cover some plugins that will help you manage this metadata.
Let’s get started…
The new Properties feature
The update brings a UI to the top of every note, replacing the original YAML metadata view that used to come between three dashed lines on the top and the bottom of the block.
You can now create properties that have an entry field, customising the type of property they are, whether text, a list, tags, a number, a checkbox, date or time. When you’re typing in these fields, you are suggested the values of that property which exist within your other notes as well, speeding up property entry.
This is a great feature that I sorely missed from previous versions of Obsidian, relying on plugins like Frontmatter tag suggest and Metadata Menu.
You also get suggestions when creating the identity of a new property. You can now see a drop-down list of all the properties in all the notes in your vault.
Combining both suggestion features when creating the property and adding values to the property, you can be a lot more consistent and faster when inputting values into the metadata of your notes.
The new properties are still based on YAML, despite having this new look, so you don’t have to worry about transferring your metadata from one form to another — your fields are going to be shown as properties by default from now on.
There are a couple of commands for the Properties feature in Obsidian already. ‘Show all properties’ adds a pane in the right-hand panel, listing all the different properties that can be found in your notes. There are options to change the property type, as well as delete it from all your notes.
The other command is similar — ‘Show file properties’ creates a pane in the right sidebar that contains the properties section alone, allowing you to edit the properties of an active file regardless of whether the properties are visible in the main editor.
This addition of a more user-friendly version of note metadata is a change that makes Obsidian more similar to the database and metadata power of Notion. This is a good change, because Notion’s databases are one of its standout features, and this means Obsidian comes closer to this capability whilst keeping all of the features that set it apart from Notion as a note-taking and personal knowledge management software.
Plugins
Because the new feature is built on YAML metadata, you can use all the plugins that depend upon or use the values encoded in YAML metadata. Here are outlines of some examples:
Dataview
When Obsidian released this update on Twitter, there were a lot of comments asking whether we were going to be able to query the properties of our notes and display the results of the queries.
Because the properties are YAML-based, the Dataview plugin is as potent as ever — you don’t even have to change your queries to be up-to-date with this new change, because the underlying YAML hasn’t changed. Dataview can still be used for indexes, lists, and tables for all the properties of your notes.
I mentioned that Properties now suggest values based upon the properties of your other notes, but Metadata Menu still allows you to define these suggestions manually in its settings. This is good for fine-grain control.
You can also define FileClass properties, which are displayed in a menu so long as you specify what FileClass the active note is a part of. In a folder in your vault, you can store notes that contain all the variations in properties that different FileClasses should use. This is somewhat like templates for metadata.
You can also define the FileClass property alias in the settings, allowing binding to a property already present in your files. I’m thinking of doing this with the category
property that I’ve been using to identify the type of note that I’m working on.
Auto Note Mover
This is a plugin I only came across recently, but it’s been very useful in keeping my vault consistent and organised.
You use it to define circumstances in which your notes should be moved into a specific folder. I use it to move published article outlines into an archive folder when the unpublished tag in a note changes to published. This means that I’m only seeing the pieces that I’m currently working on within my Content folder note.
I’d have included MetaEdit in a list like this, but it seems that the update has caused the plugin to stop working — nothing happens when I run the command. This plugin allows you to quickly edit the metadata (now Properties) of your file from any point within the note. You can define values to cycle through and suggest in the settings, and the command to run the plugin can be bound to a hotkey for quick access. Hopefully this plugin gets up and running again soon.
This is it for now with this new feature update in Obsidian. I’m sure to post more information about it when I’ve had more of a chance to try out the features, and I’m sure there will be plugins to do with the change coming out soon. For now, I hope that you’ve taken some value away from this piece, and as always, thanks for reading!