Attachment Organizer

Attachment Organizer

Plan, preview, and safely organize Obsidian attachments around the notes that use them.

Attachment Organizer scans configurable areas of your vault, explains what should happen to each file, and waits for your approval before moving anything. It is built for vaults that mix notes, PDFs, images, drawings, and imported files across several folders.

Preview

The Organizer gives every item a compact status:

Use the six filter buttons to focus the tree. Your selection is remembered when the Organizer is closed, reopened, or Obsidian is reloaded.

Why use it?

• Understand before changing — Review Workspace, Staging, Extra Scan, and Outside files in one tree.
• Preview the complete plan — See source files, proposed targets, and action paths before applying anything.
• Keep risky cases still — Missing files and conflicts are reported instead of guessed or overwritten.
• Organize around notes — Place attachments beside a note, in a note subfolder, in a specified folder, or at the vault root.
• Handle real vaults — Detect regular links, embeds, frontmatter links, Excalidraw files, and Canvas files.
• Recover from mistakes — Undo the most recent batch operation.
• Search without drawing noise — Optionally seed global Search with -file:.excalidraw.md whenever Search receives focus.

Typical workflow

1. Define a Workspace folder and a Staging folder in the plugin settings.
2. Optionally add one or more Extra Scan folders for files stored elsewhere.
3. Run Attachment Organizer: Open organizer from the command palette.
4. Filter the tree, enable Preview, and inspect any B, R, M, or C items.
5. Choose Apply plan only when the proposed moves look correct.
6. Use Undo last operation if the last batch needs to be reverted.

Nothing is moved during scanning or preview. Applying a plan requires confirmation, and conflict entries stay in place.

Organizer controls

From left to right, the toolbar provides:

The filter panel supports Notes, Keep, To staging, Relocate, Missing, and Conflict as independent toggles. The optional statistics row updates immediately when its setting changes.

Configuration

Scan zones

Files outside the configured zones can still appear under Outside when a note references them, when they are missing, or when they participate in the plan. Extra Scan is deliberately conservative: keep it disabled unless a specific outside folder is required. Enabling it without adding a folder does not scan the whole vault; this keeps large vaults and development trees responsive.

Links and placement

Explicit paths in note links take priority over the general placement policy.

Safety and detection

The built-in attachment rules recognize .excalidraw.md and .canvas.md. The Search exclusion remains editable: remove it for the current search, and it will be seeded again the next time Search is opened or refocused.

Preview

Installation

Community plugins

When Attachment Organizer is available in Obsidian's community plugin catalog:

1. Open Settings → Community plugins → Browse.
2. Search for Attachment Organizer.
3. Install and enable the plugin.

GitHub release

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Create <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/attachment-organizer/.
3. Copy the three files into that folder.
4. Reload Obsidian and enable Attachment Organizer under Community plugins.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/Kiteruunner/obsidian-attachment-organizer.git
cd obsidian-attachment-organize
npm install
npm run build

Copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into the plugin folder in your vault.

Commands

• Attachment Organizer: Open organizer
• Attachment Organizer: Rescan attachments
• Attachment Organizer: Apply organizer plan
• Attachment Organizer: Undo last organizer operation

Development

npm install
npm run lint
npm run build

The release workflow builds the plugin and publishes the three Obsidian release assets from a version tag.

License

MIT © Kirun