Metadata Menu

With the release of Obsidian 1.4.5, many people’s focus has been on metadata, which Obsidian calls Properties. I have written a series of articles (see Freeing Your Thinking) on using Obsidian’s natural database features, and my entire workflow depends heavily on metadata. Naturally, I was anticipating this release with some excitement, having seen some previews on YouTube.

I was frankly disappointed. It is movement in a positive direction, and has some very nice features for managing metadata. However, its insistence on YAML for properties when many users such as myself prefer in-line metadata for its flexibility, makes some of its features useless to me.

Another reason for my disappointment, or feeling underwhelmed, was that I had already discovered a truly amazing plugin for managing metadata which did everything I need and more. Metadata Menu, a Community Plugin by mathieu, provides a full set of features for managing properties. It has a modal, available in multiple places, which allows you to manage literally all aspects of a file’s metadata without opening the file, perfect for my workflow. It even has a file class template system which supports nesting groups of metadata fields. Fields in tables can have actions, allowing for direct editing of metadata in the table itself using standard widgets. And, it is visually clean and attractive

This video isn’t a guide to using Metadata Menu. Rather, it’s to show off some of its features. If metadata is important to you, you must check it out.