Obsidian Media Vault

I track the media I consume, that being books, music, movies, series and games. I once had a post on this page going into detail why I did this, but I felt it became a bit too philosophical. Earnestly, I do it because it I like cataloguing things and seeing that catalogue expand.

To this end, I previously used numerous websites for tracking media consumption, those being:

• Rate Your Music for music (mainly albums)
• Letterboxd for movies
• Infinite Backlog for games
• Goodreads and later Bookwyrm for books

But honestly, it was a bit tedious using all these sites. Especially since they all have many gimmicks to keep users coming back and are trying to envelop me in communities I do not want to partake in. Ever since reading Digital Minimalism I have been more thoughtful about the technology/websites I use, what they take from me and what I gain from them. And I have decided that there is a better way.

Obsidian

The note-taking tool Obsidian has been a staple of my digital life since I discovered it in 2022. I already use it for:

• Management of personal projects
• Technical notes
• Long-running task management
• Cheat-sheets
• Reference management

But with the bases functionality introduced recently, I can treat each note in my Obsidian vault as an entry in a database, which opens up the possibility for a whole new type of use-case.¹

Each of those small square pictures is a note inside my Obsidian vault. Notes in Obsidian are written in the simple Markdown language, but the metadata which is shown in this table, is obtained from the YAML-frontmatter of each note. It typically looks like this

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---
title: Blue Lines
artist: Massive Attack
year: 1991
date: 2026-03-25
rating: 8
image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a7/MassiveAttackBlueLines.jpg
active: false
wishlist: false
---

This frontmatter lives inside a template. Each new entry in the media vault automatically has this frontmatter, and it is up to me to populate it.

While I could have added more info such as director for movies, or game studio for games, I felt that the top priority of this system, was that it is frictionless for me to use. And it really is… Along with the community extension QuickAdd, adding a new entry is super easy.

The Obsidian base easily lets me sort my media by

• Type (movies, books, etc.)
• Date
• Rating

or any combination, such as “movies I watched in 2025 with greater than 8/10 rating”.

Pros and cons

Pros:

• My Obsidian vault is just a collection of Markdown files. I own the files and they will never disappear, no matter what happens to Obsidian.
• One major selling point of Obsidian, is the linking between notes. Now I can link directly to a piece of media while writing my journal or some other note.
• It is significantly faster. The functionality also works on my phone, so it is very easy to hold up-to-date.
• I do not get distracted by unnecessary features.

Cons:

• Missing discovery features (I was not using those in the first place).
• Harder to show off to friends to flex on them.

For the last reason, I am still keeping a Rate Your Music account as mine has huge flexing potential. But other than that, I am migrating everything to my new Obsidian media vault.

The technical bit

If you want to set this up yourself, you should do the following:

• Create a new Obsidian template with your desired frontmatter
• Install QuickAdd through the community plugin browser
• Add a new choice to QuickAdd (e.g. Add music), select template path and destination path (I use Media/Music/)
• Create a new Obsidian base and add the following filter for all views:

All the following are true
    where  folder     starts with  Media
    and    extension  is           md

• Then add a new view and under Configure view set layout to Cards and Image property to image

That’s it.