The other day I found evidence of Obsidian’s new official web clipper while scrolling through Twitter.
I don’t think this browser extension has been announced officially yet (Edit: this is because it only works for the latest version of Obsidian, which is 17.2 at the time of writing) but I thought I’d get ahead of the curve and quickly share what I’ve been using it for so far.
Let’s get started…
Web clipper function
The web clipper parses and formats all of the text on a web page to be imported into Obsidian neatly and legibly.
It also reads the metadata of a web page and populates it in the properties you specify in the note template (which I’ll touch on in a bit).
So far I’ve been using the web clipper to save the entirety of some of my favourite internet writing into Obsidian. Before, all I had was the Readwise highlights of these pieces but seeing as capturing the entire content is so accessible now, I’ve started to do it for my favourites.
This shows ‘Style is consistent constraint’ by Obsidian’s very own CEO Steph Ango (who I believe was instrumental in the creation of this browser extension), clipped into my Obsidian vault, perfectly formatted with no input on my end.
Web clipper templates
If you like a little customisation in what you’re doing in your vault, don’t worry. I am as well, and this extension offers plenty of customisation options for the content that you’re importing.
First of all, if you have multiple vaults on your machine, you have a choice of which vault to import to. I’ve always preached keeping things simple and just having a single vault to keep things simple but I can understand that there are people out there with more than one, who will want to have control over where their web clippings are stored.
You can also control which properties of the current page are captured in the note you’re creating. This includes the actual name of properties in your template as well. This feature useful to make sure the content that you’re capturing is in line with the schema you use to organise and keep the other parts of your vault in check as well (for example I use the name ‘aliases’ when capturing the title of an internet piece in my notes — the extension copes with this perfectly).
For me, this meant that I could simply make a template that closely followed that of the one that I use for my Readwise highlights. Now all the notes where I’m capturing content that is not mine look the same, are stored similarly and remain consistent with each other.
This is great if you’re someone who works with a lot of information from others as well as yourself, making sure you have different properties and metadata for all notes, distinguishing one type from another.
Some of the variables that you can capture from the web content include the page title, authors and URL of the page you’re capturing from. These are what I add to my template, along with a simple tag that corresponds with how I’ve categorised other notes in my vault in the past…
How I’ve been using the web clipper
As the extension is quite new, I’ve not come up with too many different uses for it. Right now it’s just for collecting the very best web-based content that I come across. And that’s not much. I like to keep things minimal, which means not capturing every web page I come across into my vault — only the best is allowed in.
So it might be that I don’t use the web clipper for anything else other than this relatively minimal role. In the future, if I do want to quickly collect an entire corner of my library of internet content then I can do it from the extension rather than copying and pasting. Seeing as I’ve been moving a lot of my content around quite a bit recently, this might come in useful.
Before, collecting web content into Obsidian wasn’t that straightforward. A lot of other apps such as Notion and Evernote have had well-documented web clipper browser extensions for a long time. Until now, a lot of Obsidian users have been making do with the extension MarkDownload as well as a few other unofficial tools.
Now we’ve got a low-friction, Obsidian-specific solution — a great help to people looking for an extension that ties into many of the best features of Obsidian, such as Properties and markdown formatting.
Thanks for reading!