Most people don’t have access to Properties in Obsidian at the moment, because they’re only available in Insider Builds that come with a Catalyst license.
I’m here to figure things out and tell you how best to use this feature when it rolls out to everyone.
This piece was written several days after the release of the Properties to Insiders. I’ve had some time to play around with the feature, seeing how it changes things in terms of metadata in my notes, and I’m going to share my findings with you here in this piece.
Let’s get started…
What are Obsidian Properties?
They’re simply a UI that’s been developed for the YAML metadata of your notes.
It makes note properties similar to what’s found in apps like Notion, Tana and Capacities, rather than lines of code you have to write at the top of your note.
Thankfully, they’re still based on YAML, so your hard work adding properties to your notes this way hasn’t gone to waste.
When I installed the update everything had seamlessly transferred from YAML to properties without a hitch.
Impressive.
How do I use Obsidian Properties?
Within my productivity systems, I like to keep things very simple, or they distract me from my work. It’s the same with YAML metadata. Most notes only have a category
property to define what sort of note they are (like Objects in Capacities). There are some with more detailed properties, like essay manuscripts but for the most part, I’ve kept things simple.
This means that not much has changed from managing YAML to managing Properties. The autosuggest features for new properties and property values are an excellent addition, helping to keep the metadata of your notes consistent.
There’s an option in the editor settings to hide the properties in the main view of the note, to instead show them in the sidebar. I’ve chosen this option because it makes the UI simpler in the active pane of your note, so you can focus on your writing.
In terms of templates, everything transferred seamlessly from YAML to properties too.
You can add properties to your templates in the same way you’d have added YAML.
You can have a property that serves as a list with the new update, therefore I’ve changed my permanent note template slightly with the update…
I now manage references under a property called references
instead of managing them under a heading at the end of the note. I add all the links of relevant notes in the properties here so that the note remains focused on the text, without a bunch of links at the end.
This pushes me to add inline links in the notes that I’ve created, which is beneficial because they have more context than reference links, leading to more solid inspiration and research when looking through your slipbox.
There are some people doing more exciting things than me with this new feature.
Tim Miller of obsidian.rocks has been sharing some snippets from his vault that look very powerful, changing charts and values in the views in his notes. If you feel as though I’ve given you an insufficient overview of the feature’s capabilities you can check him and his new article out here…
Thanks for reading this piece, I hope you’ve learned something new about Obsidian’s hottest new feature. Properties make metadata so much more accessible for people, and I’m excited to see improvements in the way we categorise, structure and organise our notes because of it.