Film Tracker

Film + Anime-Manga Tracker

Add films, TV series, anime, manga, music and games to your Obsidian vault as notes with metadata and a poster.

Search for a film, pick it from the list, and Film + Anime-Manga Tracker creates a note containing exactly two things: a frontmatter block with the film's metadata, and the poster. Nothing else. No rating, no review section, no template. What you write in the note is up to you.

TV series work the same way, also from TMDB: one note per show, with its seasons kept in the note itself and a SEASONS panel to tick them off as you watch. See TV series.

Albums, artists and songs work the same way too, from MusicBrainz, with no key to set up. See Music.

Games come from IGDB, with where you are with each one — in your backlog, playing, completed — kept in the note. See Games.

Anime and manga follow the same philosophy, sourced from MyAnimeList. The two even share a single note when they're the same series: search for either half and Film + Anime-Manga Tracker creates or merges into one Series note, with a separate panel below the properties for the manga side. See Anime and manga for details.

Design philosophy

This plugin is not meant to turn your vault into a Wikipedia.

It's a personal tracker, not a database. It automates the parts that are just busywork — metadata, posters, connecting a film to its director or a manga to its author — so you don't have to type them in by hand or go hunting for a poster image every time. It has no interest in being a complete encyclopedia of everything you've ever watched or read.

The goal is narrower than that: keep a record of what you've seen, link the people and works behind it, and leave the rest of the note empty. Metadata is scaffolding, not content — it's there to support your own thoughts, not replace them. The note's body is where those actually live, and the plugin never touches it.

Installing

Film + Anime-Manga Tracker is available in the Obsidian Community Plugins.

1. Open Settings → Community plugins.
2. Click Browse and search for Film + Anime-Manga Tracker.
3. Click Install.
4. Enable Film + Anime-Manga Tracker under Community plugins.

Updating

Obsidian will notify you when a new version is available.

Setup

1. Create a free TMDB account and open your API settings.
2. Copy the API Key (v3 auth) value — the short one, not the long read access token.
3. Paste it into Settings → Film + Anime-Manga Tracker → TMDB API key. Every user needs their own key — it's free and takes a minute.

For anime and manga, register a free app in your MyAnimeList API config and paste its Client ID into Settings → Film + Anime-Manga Tracker → MyAnimeList client ID. No OAuth, no redirect URI to configure — search and metadata only need the client ID.

For games, register a free app in the Twitch developer console — IGDB is run by Twitch — and paste its Client ID and Client Secret into IGDB client ID and IGDB client secret. See Games for the steps.

On Obsidian 1.11.4 or later, the keys go into Obsidian's keychain instead of the plugin's settings file: next to TMDB API key and MyAnimeList client ID, add a new secret and paste the value into it, or pick one you already have. The keychain keeps them out of the vault — and out of anything that syncs or backs it up — but it's kept per device, so on a second device you add them there once too. Keys typed into an earlier version move to the keychain on their own the first time the plugin loads. On older versions of Obsidian, the keys are typed in and saved with the other settings, as before.

Tips for a smooth start

A handful of mistakes account for most of the confusion new users hit:

• Everyone needs their own TMDB API key. It isn't bundled with the plugin and can't be shared — each person pastes their own free key into settings (see Setup). Without it, the TMDB commands (Add film, Add director, Refresh metadata from TMDB, Import from Letterboxd) don't run — each shows a notice pointing you to settings instead.
• Set watch_date to a Date property once. Fresh out of the box it's plain text, so sorting by date won't work until you do the one-time type change on any note. Obsidian remembers it vault-wide after that.
• Folders only decide where new notes go. Film + Anime-Manga Tracker recognizes a note by its properties, not by its folder, so moving notes around, changing a folder setting later, or leaving a folder empty (the vault root) is safe — duplicates are still caught, and a director is never mistaken for a film.
• Turning on Add cast / Add composers later doesn't back-fill old notes. Those settings only apply going forward. Run Refresh metadata from TMDB on a note to pull in fields you enabled after creating it.
• Never delete or hand-edit tmdb_id. It's the only thing Film + Anime-Manga Tracker uses to recognize "this note already exists" and to know what to refresh — renaming the file itself is safe, but losing tmdb_id isn't.
• Picking from search: when a title has several versions (remakes, franchises), check the year shown next to each result before choosing — titles alone are often ambiguous.
• Letterboxd import runs once per file. Films already in your vault (matched by tmdb_id) are skipped rather than duplicated, so re-running the same export after adding more notes by hand is safe — it only fills gaps: a missing watch_date, and watched if you choose to mark the films as watched.
• A blank poster/photo isn't necessarily a bug. Some TMDB entries genuinely have no image; the note is still created with full metadata either way.
• Anime and manga only merge into one note when you open the right note first. There's no automatic matching — if you want a Series note with both, add one half, keep that note open in the editor, run the other Add command and confirm Link to this note (see Anime and manga).
• Never delete or hand-edit mal_id, or the manga block's mal_id. Same rule as tmdb_id: they're what Film + Anime-Manga Tracker uses to recognize a note and know what to refresh. The same goes for a game's igdb_id, and for the MusicBrainz ids of music notes.
• Games need IGDB's client ID and secret, from a free Twitch app — a few minutes, once (see Setting up IGDB). Without them Add game points you to settings.

Usage

Run Add film from the command palette, or click the film icon in the ribbon and pick Add film. Type at least two characters, pick the right film, and the note is created and opened.

Search works in any language: typing Amelie, Amélie, or Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain all find the same film.

TV series work the same way: run Add TV series, search, and pick the show. The note holds the whole series — every season that has aired, with its own episode count — so there is nothing to pick twice and nothing to keep in step by hand. See TV series.

Directors work the same way: run Add director, or click the ribbon icon and pick Add director. The note gets the director's name, birthday, place of birth and a photo — nothing else, same philosophy as a film note.

Anime and manga work the same way too: run Add anime or Add manga, search MyAnimeList, pick a result. Each result shows its type and year next to the title (TV, Movie, Manga, Light novel…), since MyAnimeList often has several entries sharing one title. See Anime and manga for how the two combine into one Series note.

Music works the same way, with no key: run Add album or Add artist, search MusicBrainz, and pick. See Music.

Games work the same way too: run Add game, search IGDB and pick. A remake, a remaster or a port says what it is beside the year. See Games.

Mangaka work a little differently: open the manga or Series note whose author you want to add, then run Add mangaka — it reads that note's own manga metadata to find the author on MyAnimeList directly, rather than opening a search box. One credited author adds straight away; more than one shows a quick pick list. See Anime and manga for the MANGAGRAPHY panel it unlocks.

Commands

Importing from Letterboxd

1. On Letterboxd, go to Settings → Import & Export → Export your data, and unzip the download.
2. Drag diary.csv into your vault (or watched.csv if you only want the list of films without watch dates).
3. Run Import from Letterboxd from the command palette, or use the button in settings, and pick that file.
4. Choose whether to mark these films as watched. It starts on for diary.csv, watched.csv, ratings.csv and reviews.csv, which only list films you've seen, and off for anything else — watchlist.csv has exactly the same columns as watched.csv, so its name is the only way to tell them apart.
5. Film + Anime-Manga Tracker searches TMDB for each entry and creates a note for anything not already in your vault — the same note, with the same two things, as adding a film by hand.

From diary.csv, the Watched Date column fills in watch_date on notes it creates. Nothing else from the export is imported: Rating, Tags and Rewatch are your own commentary, not the plugin's, so they are never read.

A film already in your vault (matched by tmdb_id) is skipped rather than duplicated; if it has no watch_date yet, the import fills that in from the diary entry, and with mark these films as watched on it ticks watched (it never unticks it). Letterboxd and TMDB sometimes put a film a year apart, so a result within a year of the export's year still counts. When a title in the CSV has no TMDB match that close, it is left out rather than guessed and listed, with the reason, in a Film + Anime-Manga Tracker Import Report note created at the end.

Closing the progress window, with Esc or its close button, stops the import the same way Cancel does; what was imported by then stays. Only one import runs at a time: starting a second while one is running just tells you so.

Importing from MyAnimeList

1. Run Import from MyAnimeList, or use the button in settings.
2. Type the MyAnimeList username whose list to read — your own, usually.
3. Choose the anime list, the manga list, or both, and which shelves to take: Completed and Watching or reading to start with, and On hold, Dropped and Plan to watch or read if you want them too.
4. Film + Anime-Manga Tracker reads the list a hundred entries at a time and writes a note for each one, with its poster.

What you have completed arrives ticked: an anime as watched, a manga as read — and read is set on every note carrying that manga, the way the Read checkbox does. Anything already in your vault is recognized by its MyAnimeList id, wherever its note lives, and is never written a second time; a completed entry whose note isn't ticked yet gets ticked, and nothing is ever unticked.

Nothing is matched by title, so there is no guessing. What can still go wrong is a name: when a note of your own already has the name an entry would take, that entry is left out and listed in the Film + Anime-Manga Tracker Import Report note written at the end. Closing the progress window stops the import, the same as Cancel, and only one import runs at a time.

The list has to be public. That's a MyAnimeList setting (Account settings → My List → List visibility), not something the plugin can change: MyAnimeList only shares a private list with the account that owns it, which would need signing in.

What gets written

---
title: Amélie
original_title: Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain
aliases:
  - Amélie
  - Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain
year: 2001
directors:
  - Jean-Pierre Jeunet
genres:
  - Comedy
  - Romance
runtime: 122
poster: "[[Attachments/Amélie (2001).jpg]]"
tmdb_id: 194
watch_date:
watched: false
---

cast and composers are optional and off by default — turn them on in settings to have them written too.

That is the whole file. The body is left empty: the poster is rendered from the poster property, beside the properties, so everything below the top of the note is yours.

• title is the English title. When TMDB has no English translation for a film, it falls back to the original title.
• original_title is always the title in the film's own language.
• aliases holds the title and the original title, so either one finds the note in search and link suggestions. Add your own aliases freely: a refresh only replaces the ones it wrote.
• watch_date is left empty on purpose. Film + Anime-Manga Tracker never fills it in — it is yours to complete when you have seen the film.
• watched is a plain checkbox, separate from watch_date, for exactly the "I know I've seen it but don't remember when" case. Film + Anime-Manga Tracker never touches it after creation — tick or untick freely, it's yours. The one exception is the Letterboxd import, which can tick it (never untick it) for films your export says you've seen.

Director notes

---
name: Andrei Tarkovsky
original_name: Андрей Арсеньевич Тарковский
aliases:
  - Andrei Tarkovsky
  - Андрей Арсеньевич Тарковский
birthday: 1932-04-04
deathday: 1986-12-29
place_of_birth: Zavrazhye, USSR
poster: "[[Directors/Andrei Tarkovsky.jpg]]"
tmdb_id: 8452
---

Same philosophy as a film note: structured data and a photo, nothing else. The photo is written to the poster property on purpose — Film + Anime-Manga Tracker's layout renders any note carrying tmdb_id and poster beside its properties, so a director note gets the exact same two-column layout as a film note for free.

original_name is a best-effort guess: TMDB doesn't tag alternate names by language, so Film + Anime-Manga Tracker infers the director's native writing system from place_of_birth (Russia → Cyrillic, Japan → Japanese, China → Chinese, and similarly for Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Thai) and picks the first alternate name written in it. aliases then holds just name and original_name — not TMDB's full, noisy list of transliterations — plus any alias you add yourself, which a refresh keeps. For a director from a Latin-script country (France, Poland, Germany, …), or when nothing matches, original_name is left empty for you to fill in by hand, the same way watch_date is.

Anime notes

---
title: Hunter x Hunter
english_title: Hunter x Hunter
japanese_title: ハンター×ハンター
media_type: tv
episodes: 148
episodes_watched: 148
genres:
  - Action
  - Adventure
studios:
  - Madhouse
status: finished_airing
year: 2011
end_year: 2014
poster: "[[Attachments/Hunter x Hunter.jpg]]"
mal_id: 11061
watch_start:
watch_date: 2026-04-02
watched: true
---

Same philosophy as a film note: structured metadata and a poster, nothing else. watched is a plain checkbox Film + Anime-Manga Tracker sets once and never touches again — same role as a film's watched.

episodes_watched and watch_date are yours: Watch one more episode counts up, Mark as watched today fills both in, and a refresh from MyAnimeList never touches either. watch_start — the day you started — is yours alone: the plugin makes room for it and never writes it, since only you know when you began. The poster carries a small bar showing how far through the episodes you are, with +1 episode and Watched today under it; both disappear once there is nothing left to mark. All four commands are on the note's own menus too — right-click in the editor, the tab's menu, or the file explorer.

year and end_year are the years it started and finished, as MyAnimeList has them. Something still running has no end_year, and neither has anything MyAnimeList never gave an end date. Both are years rather than full dates: MyAnimeList often knows only the year for older works.

When the same note also has a manga side, its metadata lives in a single nested manga property instead of being mixed into the fields above — see Anime and manga for why, and for the panel that actually shows it.

Mangaka notes

---
name: Yoshihiro Togashi
birthday: 1966-04-27
poster: "[[Mangaka/Yoshihiro Togashi.jpg]]"
mal_id: 1893
---

Same philosophy as a director note, with a smaller field set: MyAnimeList's person data only ever gives a name, a birthday and a photo — there's no equivalent of a director's original_name, aliases, deathday or place_of_birth to carry. See Anime and manga for how this note gets created and the MANGAGRAPHY panel it comes with.

Make watch_date a date property

The first time you add a film, open the note's properties, click the type icon next to watch_date and choose Date. Obsidian remembers the type for that property across your whole vault, so you only do this once.

Settings

The settings are on six pages — 🔑 API keys, 🎬 Films, 📺 TV series, 🌸 Anime & manga, 🎵 Music and 🎮 Games — each opened from the plugin's settings tab. The API keys entry says which keys are set without being opened. To find a setting without knowing its page, type in the search box above Obsidian's settings: it looks through every page. On Obsidian before 1.13, the same pages follow one another on a single page.

On Obsidian 1.13 or later these settings appear in Obsidian's own settings search, and each folder setting suggests the folders in your vault as you type. On earlier versions the plugin draws the same settings itself, with the same folder suggestions.

Behaviour worth knowing

• Duplicates. If a film or director with the same tmdb_id already exists anywhere in your vault, Film + Anime-Manga Tracker opens it instead of creating a second one. It never overwrites a note you have written in. Games are matched the same way by igdb_id, albums, artists and songs by their MusicBrainz ids.
• How notes are recognized. By their properties, never by their folder. A film's and a director's TMDB ids can be the same number, so they're told apart by what each note holds: a director note has name, a film has directors. That's what keeps a refresh from ever writing a film's data into a director note (or an anime's into a mangaka note), whatever your folder settings are.
• Missing posters. If TMDB has no poster or photo, or the download fails, the note is still created with its metadata. The image is never worth losing the note over.
• File names. Film notes are named English Title (Year).md; director notes are named after the person. Characters that are illegal in file names or that break wikilinks are removed, so Face/Off becomes Face Off (1997). A title that already ends in its year — MyAnimeList writes remakes as Hunter x Hunter (2011) — keeps it once.
• Same-named works. When another of the plugin's notes already has the name a new note would get (two films with one title and year, a light novel and its manga), the new note takes the next free name: a manga-only note tries its title with the year added, and past that a number is added (Home (2015) 2.md). A note of your own under that name is never written beside — the plugin opens it and leaves both alone.
• Layout. In a note the plugin wrote — a film, a series, an anime, an album, a game… — that has a poster, the title and properties sit in a left column with the poster beside them, in both live preview and reading view. The poster is drawn from the poster property rather than embedded in the body, so the body stays empty and entirely yours. Narrow windows and mobile stack it vertically. To change the poster size, override --film-tracker-poster-width in a CSS snippet.
• Poster links. Posters and photos are always linked as [[wikilinks]], even with Obsidian's Use [[Wikilinks]] setting turned off, since that's the link a property understands. Posters an earlier version wrote as Markdown links still show.
• Anime duplicates. Same rule as film duplicates, matched by mal_id anywhere in your vault.
• Manga duplicates. Matched by the manga side's own MAL id, wherever it's currently stored (a fresh note, or nested inside an existing Series note next to an anime side). This only stops a second note of its own: the same manga — or the same anime — can be linked into as many Series notes as it has adaptations (see Adaptations).
• Mangaka duplicates. Same rule as film duplicates, matched by mal_id anywhere in your vault. An anime's id and a mangaka's id (different MyAnimeList id spaces) can be the same number, so a mangaka note is told apart by its properties — name, and none of an anime's fields — never by its folder.
• Anime and manga never merge automatically. MyAnimeList's own anime↔manga relation data turned out to be unreliable via the official API (empty even for very well-known pairs), so merging is manual: open the note that already has one side, run Add anime or Add manga for the other, and confirm — see Anime and manga.

Films as part of your vault

The point of keeping films as notes rather than rows in an app is that they can connect to everything else you write.

With Link directors on, a film's directors are written as links:

directors:
  - "[[Damien Chazelle]]"

Open Damien Chazelle and every one of their films is waiting in the backlinks pane — no query, no configuration. The graph grows director clusters on its own.

Links are only written when a note by that name already exists, so your vault never fills up with links to notes you did not want. When you do write a note about a director later, run Relink directors and genres and the films you added earlier catch up (this also relinks cast and composers, when those settings are on).

A refresh never takes a link away. A name that's already linked in a note stays linked, written exactly as it was — even with its Link setting off, and even before its note exists — so a link you added by hand is safe.

Turn on Add cast and Link cast and the same thing happens for actors — open an actor's note and every film of theirs in your vault is in the backlinks pane. Add composers/Link composers does the same for the score composer.

Connections

Below a film's or a TV series' properties (and poster, if it has one), Film + Anime-Manga Tracker shows other films and series in your vault that share a director, a creator, a composer or a cast member — with the shared name next to each one. A film and a series count as connected when the same person directed one and created the other. This works whether or not Link cast/Link directors/Link composers are on: it compares the names directly, not the links. Genres are deliberately left out — two films both being "Drama" is not a connection.

This panel is rendered, not written to the note — it appears and disappears as your vault changes, and never touches the file.

Filmography

A person note gets the same panel, labeled Filmography instead: every film in your vault whose directors credits that person — matched against name and aliases (so both the English and native-language spelling work), oldest first, linked directly. Like Connections, it is rendered rather than written to the note.

Under it, TV series lists the series in your vault whose creators credits them, in a box of its own. Two lists rather than one, because a percentage over both would say nothing: a five-season series and a film are not the same unit.

Each heading shows what share of that list has watched ticked, e.g. "FILMOGRAPHY · 90% watched" — computed from what is already in your vault, not TMDB's full catalog for that person, and equally rendered-only: nothing is written to the note.

Every one of these panels can be turned off on its own in settings: Show connections, Show filmography, Show TV series and Show seasons.

Queries worth keeping

Films you have not watched yet:

```dataview
TABLE year, directors
FROM "Films"
WHERE !watch_date
SORT year DESC
```

Everything by one director, ordered by year:

```dataview
TABLE year, runtime
FROM "Films"
WHERE contains(directors, this.file.link)
SORT year ASC
```

Put that second one in the director's own note and it fills itself in.

What you watched, most recent first:

```dataview
TABLE watch_date, year
FROM "Films"
WHERE watch_date
SORT watch_date DESC
```

If you use Bases (Obsidian 1.9+), point a new base at the Films folder and set the card image to the poster property to get a poster wall.

TV series

One note per show. The seasons live in the note, as a line each, and they are the only record of what you have watched: the counts above them are written from the seasons, never the other way round.

---
title: Breaking Bad
original_title: Breaking Bad
aliases:
  - Breaking Bad
year: 2008
end_year: 2013
creators:
  - Vince Gilligan
genres:
  - Drama
  - Crime
networks:
  - AMC
status: Ended
episodes: 62
episodes_watched: 20
poster: "[[Breaking Bad (2008).jpg]]"
tmdb_tv_id: 1396
watch_start:
watch_date:
watched: false
seasons:
  - { season: 1, year: 2008, episodes: 7, watched: 7, watch_date: 2026-09-01 }
  - { season: 2, year: 2009, episodes: 13, watched: 13, watch_date: 2026-09-10 }
  - { season: 3, year: 2010, episodes: 13, watched: 0 }
  - { season: 4, year: 2011, episodes: 13, watched: 0 }
  - { season: 5, year: 2012, episodes: 16, watched: 0 }
---

• episodes counts what has aired, not what has been announced: a season listed with episodes still to come only counts the ones that are out.
• episodes_watched is the sum of the seasons, rewritten on every change. Edit the seasons, not this.
• seasons holds one line per season that has at least one episode out. Specials (TMDB's "season 0") are left out. A season name that says more than its number is kept ("Night Country").
• watch_start is left empty and never written to: a series is watched over weeks, and the day you started is yours to fill in. watch_date is the day you finished, written when the last episode of a show that has ended goes in — or when you say Mark as watched today.
• creators, genres and cast follow the TV series settings, not the film ones: a cast list that is right for a film is often not what you want on a series that ran for years.
• tmdb_tv_id is TMDB's id for the show. It is deliberately not tmdb_id: TMDB numbers films and shows separately, and the same number is usually both.
• watched is ticked for you only when a show that has ended is fully watched. A show still running never ticks itself off, however much of it you have seen — being caught up is not the same as being finished. Mark as watched today ticks it whenever you say so.

The SEASONS panel

Below the properties, each season gets a row: a checkbox that ticks the whole season off (and dates it), a bar showing how far into it you are, and +1 for one more episode. Unticking a season sets it back to nothing and takes the show's own tick off with it.

Under the poster, the bar reads where you are the way a viewer counts: "S3E6 · 25 / 62 episodes", with +1 episode and Watched today beside it. +1 episode goes into the earliest season with something left, so a show watched in order needs nothing else.

Obsidian has no widget for a list like seasons, so the raw property row is hidden on TV notes and the panel is the view of it. The data is untouched, and the note is still an ordinary Markdown file.

A TV note shows Connections as well, in its own box under the seasons: other films and series sharing a creator, a composer or a cast member. A show's creators are the same people, on the same notes, as a film's directors — Add director writes them, and they show up in that person's Filmography under TV series.

The manga a series adapts

A TV series note can hold a manga, the same block a Series note holds: open the series, run Add manga, and answer Link to this note. The manga side keeps everything it has elsewhere — the MANGA panel, the Read checkbox, +1 chapter, Add mangaka, and a refresh from MyAnimeList — while the episodes go on coming from TMDB, season by season.

That is what makes a long-running anime work well here: TMDB has its seasons in one place, MyAnimeList has its manga, and the note holds both. A note like that shows three boxes under its properties: SEASONS, MANGA, then CONNECTIONS.

Refresh metadata from TMDB rewrites the series; Refresh anime/manga metadata from MAL rewrites the manga. Neither touches the other's half.

Anime on TMDB

TMDB lists anime among its TV shows, where a show is every season at once with its cast and crew; MyAnimeList has each season as an entry of its own, with the manga beside it. Every search result says which catalogue it came from, so the choice is between what the two give rather than between two names — and either way the manga can sit on the note (see above). If you add one anyway, and the work is already in your vault as an anime note, you are asked first — and the same question comes up the other way round, adding an anime the vault already has as a TV series. Neither is refused: the two are simply counted separately, from two catalogues that share no ids.

Music

Albums, artists and songs, from MusicBrainz — the open music encyclopedia. No key and no account: it works as soon as the plugin is installed.

Each note is its own: Add album writes the album and nothing else, Add artist writes the artist and nothing else, and a song's note is only ever written when you ask for that song. An album names its artists — as links, once their notes exist — but never creates one or any of its songs, and an artist note never creates their albums.

Album notes

---
title: OK Computer
artists:
  - "[[Radiohead]]"
year: 1997
album_type: Album
genres:
  - alternative rock
  - art rock
runtime: 53
tracks_count: 12
poster: "[[OK Computer (1997).jpg]]"
mb_album_id: b1392450-e666-3926-a536-22c65f834433
listened: true
listen_date: 2026-09-24
listen_count: 3
tracks:
  - { n: 1, title: Airbag, length: "4:44" }
  - { n: 2, title: Paranoid Android, length: "6:27" }
---

• An album is the work, not one pressing of it: OK Computer has 39 releases on MusicBrainz. The track list is read from one that came out on the album's first day — the standard edition, not a deluxe one released alongside it.
• album_type says what it is: Album, EP, Single, Soundtrack, Live, Compilation.
• listened, listen_date and listen_count are yours. Listened today ticks the album, writes the date the first time, and counts one more listen every time — an album is meant to be played again. A refresh never touches them.
• tracks holds one line per track, with disc on an album of more than one. Under the properties, the TRACKLIST panel is the readable view of it. A key you add to a track's line is kept.
• The cover comes from the album's own page on Deezer, found through the links MusicBrainz keeps — the edition with the album's own number of tracks, not a deluxe one. An album Deezer doesn't have (many soundtracks, older records) gets its cover from the Cover Art Archive instead, and failing that from Deezer's search, but only for an album whose title and artist match exactly. No cover is better than the wrong one.

Titles in other scripts

An album titled in another script — 千と千尋の神隠し サウンドトラック — also gets its title in Latin letters when MusicBrainz has one, at no extra cost: romaji first ("Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi"), then English ("Spirited Away Soundtrack"). Every form of it goes in the new note's aliases, so a search in any of them finds it, and each track's line gets its own as latin, when a release in Latin letters has the same tracks.

• Show titles in Latin letters (Music → Titles in other scripts) shows those titles on the TRACKLIST, DISCOGRAPHY and SOUNDTRACK panels and in Add song. The notes stay as they are.
• Name new notes in Latin letters names new album and song notes by them, and titles them so; their own title is kept in original_title and aliases. Lyrics are still looked up by the song's own title.
• Both are off by default. An album note already in your vault is never renamed, and a refresh adds nothing to it. Search results are shown as MusicBrainz lists them: it keeps no Latin titles there.

Song notes

A song lives with its album. Each album is a folder of its own, its note inside under the same name, and the songs you add from it go beside it. This works on its own — the album's note is simply the first file in its folder. With the Folder Notes plugin, the note is tucked away and clicking the album's folder opens it:

Music/Albums/Abbey Road (1969)/
    Abbey Road (1969).md
    Here Comes the Sun.md
    Something.md

---
title: Here Comes the Sun
aliases:
  - Here Comes the Sun (The Beatles)
artists:
  - "[[The Beatles]]"
album: "[[Abbey Road (1969)]]"
track: 7
length: "3:06"
year: 1969
poster: "[[Abbey Road (1969).jpg]]"
mb_recording_id: 440f60e8-0b25-4ec4-abb1-c6beec624ab0
---

• A song is added from its album: the + beside a track on the TRACKLIST panel, or Add song from this album. The TRACKLIST row then links the song's note.
• The note is named by the song's title, and found by "Title (Artist)" too, through its aliases. When another note in your vault already goes by that title — a second "Intro" — the new one is named "Intro (Artist)" instead, so a plain [[Intro]] never has two notes to choose from.
• An album note from before folder notes stays where it is: songs added from it go into a folder of the album's name beside it, and Move album into its folder moves the album in with them whenever you like. Nothing is ever moved on its own.
• With Album notes as folder notes off, albums sit side by side in the album folder and songs go in the song folder, named "Title (Artist)".
• album links the album's note, and track (with disc on an album of more than one) says where the song sits on it. The cover is the album's own file, linked rather than downloaded again; an album without a cover gives its songs none.
• A song's artists are its own: on a soundtrack or a compilation they are not always the album's.
• A refresh brings artists and length up to date. The title, album, track, year, the cover once there is one, your own properties and the body stay as they are.

Lyrics

Under a song's properties, the LYRICS panel shows its lyrics from LRCLIB, the open lyrics database — no key, no account.

• They are looked up by the song's title, artist, album and length. A record is only taken when its length is within a few seconds of the song's, so a live recording of the same title isn't mistaken for it. An artist with a note is also looked for by their name in their own script (宇多田ヒカル). No lyrics are better than the wrong ones.
• Lyrics once fetched are kept in the plugin's own lyrics.json, beside its settings, and show again without a connection.
• Copy lyrics into note adds them at the end of the note, under ## Lyrics. From then on they are the note's own: yours to edit, and on every device the note syncs to. The panel steps aside for a note with its own Lyrics section.
• Wrong lyrics remembers that the ones found aren't this song's; Fetch again asks LRCLIB anew. An instrumental says so.

Soundtracks

An album can be the soundtrack of a film, a TV series, an anime or a game in your vault. The link is kept on the album's note alone, in soundtrack_of, and the work's own note is never written for it:

---
title: "Interstellar: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack"
artists:
  - "[[Hans Zimmer]]"
year: 2014
album_type: Soundtrack
soundtrack_of:
  - "[[Interstellar (2014)]]"
---

• Under a film's, a TV series', an anime's or a game's properties, the SOUNDTRACK panel lists the albums that link it, with how many you have listened to.
• Find soundtrack… lists what may be its soundtrack. Wikidata comes first: it knows the soundtracks of a fair share of films and anime — not all — and what it knows is right. Then MusicBrainz's soundtracks under each of the work's titles, its original one included: a Japanese soundtrack is filed under 進撃の巨人, not under "Attack on Titan". An album from before the work is left out, and one by a composer the note names comes first. Nothing is linked until you pick it. An album already in your vault gets the link; one that isn't is added with it.
• The last row, Search MusicBrainz for another album…, is the plain album search, for a soundtrack the list doesn't have.
• From the album's side, Link to a film, series or game lists the films, TV series, anime and games in your vault, the ones Wikidata names as its works first.
• Wikidata knows a game by the end of its IGDB address — hollow-knight — which it reads from the note's url; that is all it is sent.
• An album can be the soundtrack of more than one: a compilation, or a film you have both as a film and as an anime. To take a link away, remove it from soundtrack_of in the album's properties.
• A film's own note is never changed — its SOUNDTRACK panel is worked out from the albums every time.

Finding an album

Add album searches MusicBrainz. A soundtrack, an EP or an album with a title in another script is often not near the top of that search — "Interstellar" finds a live suite before the soundtrack — so the first row of every search is Browse an artist's albums instead…: pick the artist, then the album from their own list, oldest first and filtered as you type. The artist's note isn't created for it. An artist note has the same list behind the Add album… button on its DISCOGRAPHY panel.

Artist notes

---
name: Joe Hisaishi
original_name: 久石譲
aliases:
  - Joe Hisaishi
  - 久石譲
type: Person
country: JP
born: 1950-12-06
died:
genres:
  - classical
  - cinematic classical
poster: "[[Joe Hisaishi.jpg]]"
photo_credit: Deezer
mb_artist_id: 44c64a30-1d58-49c5-b314-6e02fba49526
---

• The note is named in English. MusicBrainz names an artist in their own script — 久石譲 — and the note takes the English name, so that a film's composers: [[Joe Hisaishi]] and an album's artists both find it. Both names go in aliases, and the original in original_name.
• A person has born and died; a group has formed and disbanded.
• The photo is the artist's own press photo from their page on Deezer, found through the link MusicBrainz keeps — so it is the right artist, never a namesake. For an artist without one, it comes from Wikimedia Commons, whose photos mostly ask to be credited: photo_credit says where the photo came from, and for Commons who took it and its licence (citykane · CC BY 2.0).
• Don't like it? Change photo, under the photo, shows every photo on offer side by side — Deezer's, and up to eight from the artist's category on Commons, each with whom it credits — and the one you pick replaces it. Choose from your vault… links a picture you already have, as it is; From a web address… downloads the picture at an address you paste and credits the site. The old photo is kept unless you say otherwise.
• Under the properties, DISCOGRAPHY lists the artist's albums already in your vault, matched on every name in the note, with how many you have listened to.
• Under it, SCORES lists the films, TV series, anime and games in your vault the artist scored, with how many you have watched: a film whose composers names them (with Add composers on), and every work an album of theirs is linked to as its soundtrack — the only way an anime, a TV series or a game can say who scored it. An artist who scored nothing in your vault has no SCORES panel.

Being a good guest

Wikidata is asked only when you look for a soundtrack, and is sent only the work's TMDB or MyAnimeList id, or the album's MusicBrainz id.

IGDB is asked only for the games you search for, add and refresh. Your client secret only ever goes to Twitch, for the access token.

LRCLIB is asked only for a song's lyrics, and is sent only the song's title, artist, album and length — nothing about you. The plugin carries no lyrics of its own: it fetches the ones you open, from LRCLIB, and Show lyrics turned off stops every request to it.

MusicBrainz is run by a non-profit and asks every app for two things: at most one request a second, and a name it can reach the app's author by. The plugin does both — it waits its turn between requests and introduces itself as FilmTracker/<version> ( https://github.com/yunuskarasu/obsidian-film-tracker ) — nothing about you. That is why adding an album takes a few seconds: it is several requests at MusicBrainz's pace.

Games

Add game searches IGDB, the games database run by Twitch, and writes the game's note and cover:

---
title: Hollow Knight
aliases:
  - Hollow Knight
year: 2017
platforms:
  - PC
  - Switch
developers:
  - Team Cherry
publishers:
  - Team Cherry
genres:
  - Platform
  - Adventure
series:
  - Hollow Knight
poster: "[[Hollow Knight (2017).jpg]]"
url: https://www.igdb.com/games/hollow-knight
igdb_id: 14593
play_status: playing
played_on: Switch
completed:
completed_count: 0
hours: 12
---

• The search lists games that stand on their own: a main game, a remake, a remaster, an expanded edition, a port, a standalone expansion — each says what it is beside its year. A DLC, a bundle, a mod or an update never shows. A game titled exactly as you searched comes first, then the best known, so Final Fantasy VII itself is above its ports.
• aliases holds the game's title and its Japanese titles (ペルソナ５ タクティカ), so a search in either finds the note.
• play_status (backlog, playing, completed, abandoned), played_on, completed, completed_count and hours are yours. Start playing sets the game playing; Mark as completed today — also a button under the cover — completes it, writes the date the first time and counts one more completion every time. A refresh never touches them.
• Refresh metadata from IGDB rewrites what IGDB knows. Your aliases, a name you made a link, the cover once there is one, your own properties and the body stay as they are.
• Link developers (🎮 Games settings) writes developers and publishers as links when a note by that name exists.
• Under the properties, the DLC panel lists the DLCs and expansions added to the game, each with a checkbox: ticked, it's done and dated that day. Add DLC… — also a command and on the note's right-click menu — lists the game's own DLCs and expansions on IGDB that the note doesn't have yet. None is ever added on its own, and a refresh leaves them as they are. They're kept in the note's dlcs, one line each: { title: Hearts of Stone, year: 2015, igdb_id: 12345, done: true, completed: 2026-10-02 }.
• A game can come out on a dozen platforms. Platforms (🎮 Games settings) decides how many the note lists (0 leaves platforms out), in short names or full, and — with Only my platforms — only the ones you play on: PC, PS5, Switch. A refresh lists them by the settings of the day.

Setting up IGDB

IGDB is reached with a Twitch app's client ID and secret. It takes a few minutes, once:

1. Sign in to the Twitch developer console. Twitch asks for two-factor authentication on the account before it lets you register an app.
2. Register Your Application: any name, OAuth redirect URL http://localhost, category Application Integration, client type Confidential.
3. Open the app, copy its Client ID, press New Secret and copy the Client Secret — Twitch shows it only once.
4. Paste them into 🔑 API keys → IGDB client ID and IGDB client secret.

The plugin trades them for an access token itself, keeps the token in memory only, and asks for a new one whenever it runs out — about every two months. You never have to do anything about it, unless you make a new secret on Twitch: then paste that one in.

Anime and manga

An anime and a manga of the same series don't have to live in two separate notes. Add anime and Add manga are independent — either can come first — but when you want them combined, open the note that already has one side in the editor and run the other command. Film + Anime-Manga Tracker asks Link to this note?: link it, or keep it as a separate note. Only the note in the active editor tab is ever offered — not one you looked at earlier while Graph view or a canvas has the focus. There's no automatic matching (MyAnimeList's own anime↔manga relation data turned out to be empty via the official API even for very well-known pairs, so guessing was dropped in favor of this simple, explicit rule).

A merged Series note looks like this:

---
title: Hunter x Hunter
english_title: Hunter x Hunter
japanese_title: ハンター×ハンター
media_type: tv
episodes: 148
genres:
  - Action
  - Adventure
studios:
  - Madhouse
status: finished_airing
year: 2011
end_year: 2014
poster: "[[Attachments/Hunter x Hunter.jpg]]"
mal_id: 11061
watched: false
manga:
  mal_id: 26
  title: Hunter x Hunter
  media_type: manga
  status: currently_publishing
  year: 1998
  end_year:
  chapters: 400
  volumes: 37
  mangaka:
    - "[[Yoshihiro Togashi]]"
  poster: "[[Attachments/Hunter x Hunter (Manga).jpg]]"
  read: false
---

The properties above manga: are the anime side — same fields, same rules as any anime note. watched (anime) and manga.read are independent: watching the anime never touches read, and finishing the manga never touches watched. The manga side keeps its own chapters_read and read_date, written by Read one more chapter and Mark manga as read today and carried over by every refresh — the same way the anime side keeps episodes_watched and watch_date.

The MANGA panel

Obsidian's Properties view has no widget for a nested value like manga: — it would otherwise show up as a single property rendered as raw, unreadable JSON. Film + Anime-Manga Tracker hides that one row instead (only on notes that actually have a manga block — a manga property you've added yourself on some unrelated note is never touched) and shows the same data properly below the properties, in its own collapsible MANGA panel: the title, a line with type, year and status ("Manga · 1998 · Currently publishing") followed by the volume and chapter counts when MyAnimeList has them, mangaka (linked, same as directors — see below), the manga's own poster, how far through the chapters you are, a Read checkbox and a +1 chapter button.

That Read checkbox is the one place in Film + Anime-Manga Tracker that writes to the note from a rendered panel rather than through Properties directly — ticking it sets manga.read, today's manga.read_date and the full manga.chapters_read, on every note that carries the same manga (see Adaptations). Refreshing never touches it, the same guarantee watched and a film's watch_date already have.

Since a Series note can have its own top-level poster (the anime's) and a separate manga.poster, both are downloaded and kept independently — refreshing one side never overwrites the other's poster, or a poster that's already saved.

The panel also carries Change manga and Remove manga, for when the wrong manga ended up on a note. Change manga opens the same search box Add manga uses and swaps in whatever you pick, poster included; Remove manga asks first, then drops the manga side entirely. Both edit only the manga: block — the note is never recreated, so the anime side, its poster, watched, your own properties and the body are all left exactly as they are. Since the old manga.read and any sub-field you hand-added under manga described a different work, they don't survive the change.

The old manga's poster file stays in your vault unless you say otherwise. When nothing else uses it any more — no other note shows it as a poster (another adaptation, say), links to it or embeds it — Remove manga offers to delete it along with the manga, and Change manga asks whether to delete it once the new manga is in. A deleted poster goes wherever Obsidian's Deleted files setting sends deleted files.

Adaptations

One manga can have several anime — a remake (Hunter x Hunter 1999 and 2011), a second series, a film — and one anime can adapt more than one manga (Cowboy Bebop has two manga of its own). Each pairing gets a Series note of its own, so the same manga, or the same anime, can sit on several notes:

What happens to one of those notes happens to them all: reading a chapter, and watching an episode, are counted once and written to every note carrying that manga or that anime. Add adaptation pairs the work with the note it was run from, the same note Add anime and Add manga offer.

• Add adaptation on the MANGA panel pairs that note's manga with another anime in one step. The pairing goes on the note you ran it from when that note can take an anime; a note that already has one hands it to the anime's own anime-only note, or to a new Series note when there is none.
• The long way works too: with an anime-only note open, Add manga links a manga into it even when that manga is already on another note (and Add anime the same way into a manga-only note). The Link to this note? dialog tells you where else it already is.
• A work arriving on another note comes in step with the notes it's already on: the same poster file (never a second download), a manga already Read elsewhere arrives read, an anime already watched elsewhere arrives watched. From then on, Read is kept in step across every note carrying that manga; watched is an ordinary property of each note, yours to tick.
• A pairing only ever has one note: asking for the same anime and manga together again opens the note that already pairs them.
• Add manga or Add anime with no note of the right kind open still refuses a second note of its own for something already in your vault, and opens the existing one instead.

The MANGAGRAPHY panel

Run Add mangaka with a manga or Series note open and it reads that note's own manga metadata to find the credited author(s) on MyAnimeList — there's no search box, since MyAnimeList has no way to search for a person by name. One author adds them straight away; more than one shows a quick pick list to choose from. The resulting note lives in the Mangaka folder, with the same two-column poster layout as a film or director note.

That mangaka note's properties get a MANGAGRAPHY panel — the mangaka equivalent of Filmography: every manga in your vault credited to that person, linked directly, oldest first, matched against their name (MyAnimeList gives no alternate-name equivalent to a director's aliases to widen the match with). The heading shows what share of those are marked read, e.g. "MANGAGRAPHY · 60% read" — computed the same rendered-only way Filmography's % watched is. Clicking a manga in the list goes straight to that manga's own note, wherever it currently lives — a manga-only note, or a Series note it's merged into. A manga on several Series notes (see Adaptations) is listed once, with the other notes linked after it ("also in …"), and counts once in the read percentage.

Mangaka links

mangaka follows the exact same rule as a film's directors or cast: written as a plain name, and only turned into a [[wikilink]] once a note by that name already exists in your vault. Running Add mangaka creates that note and updates the manga side in the same step, so the wikilink appears immediately. If a mangaka note comes to exist some other way instead, run Refresh anime/manga metadata from MAL on the series afterwards to pick it up — Relink directors and genres is TMDB-only and doesn't touch anime/manga notes.

Development

npm install
npm test      # file naming, YAML output, TMDB/MAL mapping, frontmatter rewriting
npm run lint  # includes the official eslint-plugin-obsidianmd rules
npm run dev   # esbuild watch
npm run build # typecheck + production bundle

The IGDB tests replay answers saved in tests/fixtures/igdb. To save them afresh, set IGDB_CLIENT_ID and IGDB_CLIENT_SECRET in a terminal and run npx vitest run --config vitest.record.config.mts there. Only the games' data is written — never a key, a secret or a token.

Attribution

This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

Anime and manga metadata and posters come from the MyAnimeList API.

Game data and covers come from IGDB.com.

Music metadata comes from MusicBrainz, and lyrics from LRCLIB. Which album is which work's soundtrack comes from Wikidata. Album covers come from Deezer or the Cover Art Archive, and artist photos from Deezer or Wikimedia Commons, each credited in the note's own photo_credit.