If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — The Best Ways to Tidy Up Your Obsidian Vault

One thing I always struggle with when managing my Obsidian vault is tidiness.

The problem is, my thinking isn’t linear and structured, therefore my notes aren’t either. The app is so **customisable **that sometimes things can get out of hand.

This means that working in the vault over time generates loose ends and clutter like unlinked files and images, as well as inconsistencies with file formatting and storage.

Fortunately, there are options for tidying up your Obsidian vault, using various techniques, which I’m going to cover in this article. They range from plugins to reassessing your organisational methods.

Let’s get started.

If you feel you’re constantly having problems with the organisation of your files, then it’s worth taking another look at the **system **you use to run your second brain.

If it’s too complicated, you won’t feel **motivated **to stick to the system, whereas if it’s too simple, you won’t be able to cater to every type of file that you want to create.

There are a couple of popular methods that people choose for organising their files:

  • PARA— from the methodology of Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. This sorts all of your vault items into four categories — projects, areas, resources and archive. This is an excellent method of organisation if you use your vault to work on projects.
  • **Zettelkasten **— for the **researcher **or thinker, this method focuses on keeping much of your files in the same folders, and drawing links between related topics. This is a suitable method to use if you don’t want to deal with too many folders, and you want to use your vault for **thinking **rather than creating.

There are others such as Johnny.Decimal, and you can also develop your own system. This is what I’ve done, creating a fusion of PARA and Zettelkasten in my Obsidian vault.

Organising your files with a solid system goes a long way towards keeping your vault tidy, but remember to keep things as simple as possible. You want a system that can store every type of note you want to create, but as soon as you go too complicated for your workflow then you’ve introduced unnecessary friction that will reduce the effectiveness of your organisation.

If you’re happy with the organisational system of your vault, there are plugins that can help tidy up other aspects such as links, attachments and formatting. I’m going to go over them here…

This plugin does **exactly **what it says. It’ll generate you a file that contains links to notes that otherwise don’t contain any links (i.e. orphans). As well as this, it can generate files full of broken links, empty files and files without tags, whilst also providing options for **deleting **empty files and orphans.

You can **customise the output file **of all the links to the broken and empty files. There are also options to exclude files, disable working links and exclude tags for each of the cleanup options so that it only spots the problems in the circumstances you require.

This helps you to clean up your vault by showing your files that have incomplete information or don’t link to any other items in your vault. You can use this to** build better connections between ideas**, making sure they don’t get lost amongst your other notes.

Clear unused images

This is a simple plugin that checks your vault for images and other attachments that aren’t being referenced by other notes, and deletes what it finds.

This is useful to clear up your vault, but you have to be careful to make sure that you have checked all attachment links are up to date before using this plugin. This can be done relatively easily by using the plugin listed before this one. You can also configure the type of deletion that’s used for images and attachments, so that they aren’t completely gone if you make a mistake.

Hider

This is a plugin that’ll tidy up your vault differently to the other plugins mentioned so far. The Obsidian UI can be cluttered, especially for a power user who accesses everything using keyboard shortcuts. This plugin has options to toggle of lots of different UI elements.

The plugin makes it very simple to create a minimalist and clean workspace that allows you to focus on writing and creating. You can also remove UI elements using the** Style Settings** plugin dependent upon what theme you use, but Hider works with every theme, including default, which is why I’ve chosen to include it here.

Linter

This is a very powerful plugin that tidies up the content inside the files of your vault. It has options for formatting **YAML metadata, footnotes, headers and even spelling correction **in your notes.

This is a useful plugin to use if you require consistent formatting in your notes. This could be because you want to submit your notes or publish them somewhere, or it could be because you require the notes to be in a certain layout or format to integrate with other plugins.

Either way, this is the best plugin for keeping the content and formatting of your notes consistent and tidy.

You’ll be able to manage your vault easier the fewer plugins you have installed, so disable or uninstall the ones that you aren’t currently using in your system. Less is more, and you don’t need that much above base Obsidian to perform most necessary functions in the app.

I hope that this article’s given you some inspiration or actionable advice that you can try out. Thanks for reading!