Member-only story
Use YAML Front Matter Correctly in Obsidian
Add/use tags, and aliases in YAML.
If you’re an Obsidian user, there is a good chance that you already know something about YAML. It is simply a human-friendly way of adding metadata to our Obsidian notes. And today’s video is fully dedicated to learning how to use YAML correctly in our Obsidian notes. If you’re curious about the Obsidian Dataview plugin, then you must be inspired to learn YAML as it will help us take full advantage of that powerful Obsidian Plugin.
Before going over YAML, let’s first understand what is metadata.
What Is Metadata?
Metadata is just a set of data that describes and gives information about other data, but not the content of the data. — Wikipedia
Almost every digital file has some sort of metadata. If you take a picture with your phone or camera it will have a bunch of metadata, it’ll have its size, pixel resolution, file type, file name, etc.
Now that’s the metadata that gets automatically created, but we can also create our metadata in Obsidian notes.
Now bring the metadata concepts to Obsidian. Let’s say that you’re typing out a book note here on Obsidian. Some examples of metadata would be the book cover, author, category, highlights from the book, or maybe some tags, etc.
Suppose we have added ‘aliases’ metadata to the above file using the YAML block, then we could search this file using the alias as well as the original file title.
By creating metadata using YAML, we could quickly understand the key properties of a file by only looking at the metadata — such as the associated project, etc.
