Use YAML Front Matter Correctly in Obsidian

Add/use tags, and aliases in YAML.

Amy Li, PhD
8 min readNov 29, 2022

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Image created by Amy Li using Canva.

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.

Screenshot by Amy Li

Now that’s the metadata that gets automatically created, but we can also create our metadata in Obsidian notes.

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Amy Li, PhD

Software Developer | Ph.D. in Medicine. I write about programming, productivity, personal development, and entrepreneurship. https://www.youtube.com/@amyjuanli