Who it is for

Save a web page straight into your Obsidian vault

Clean Clipper writes the .md file into your vault itself, through the browser’s File System Access API. There is no community plugin, no local REST server and no obsidian:// link in the chain, and Obsidian does not have to be running for the note to arrive.

Why the vault is the hard part

Getting a web page into a vault usually means a chain of moving parts: a community plugin to install and keep updated, a local REST API listening on a port, or an obsidian:// URL that only fires when the app is already open. Each link breaks on its own schedule – after an app update, after a plugin author moves on, after a browser tightens what a custom protocol may do.

The other half of the problem is what arrives. A clip full of the site’s navigation is not a note; it is a cleanup task you have deferred. Add a filename that is the raw page title with a slash in it, and frontmatter that says nothing about where the text came from, and a month later the vault holds material you no longer trust enough to quote.

The filename is a decision you only get to make once, and most people make it by accident. Obsidian links by filename, so every [[wikilink]] you write to a clipped note breaks the day you rename it – and a note called Home or Untitled 4 is going to be renamed. Setting a template before the first clip, rather than after two hundred, is the difference between a vault you can link into and a folder you only ever search.

What one click actually does

• No plugin, no local server, no obsidian:// links – the browser writes the file into the folder you granted.
• Obsidian does not need to be open. The note is simply there the next time it is.
• YAML frontmatter with title, source, author, date and extraction – and you pick which of those to keep.
• A filename template with {title}, {date} and {domain}, plus a subfolder inside the vault.
• Per-site rules can send discussion threads to one folder and documentation to another, automatically.
• A name collision gets a numeric suffix, so an earlier clip of the same page is never overwritten.
• The frontmatter is ordinary YAML, so Obsidian’s Properties panel shows source as a clickable link and date as a date rather than as text.
• Writing is one-way. The extension can add files to the folder you granted and cannot list, open or read the notes already in it.

---
title: "Getting started with Obsidian"
source: "https://help.obsidian.md/Home"
extraction: "dom"
---

## Create a vault

A vault is a folder on your computer. Obsidian stores your notes as plain
Markdown files inside it, and nothing else is required to open them.

- Notes are files. Folders are folders.
- Everything works offline.

Pointing it at your vault

The whole setup is one folder grant and three settings. Do it before the first clip – the filename template in particular is much cheaper to choose now than to change later.

1. In Obsidian, create the folder you want clips to live in – Clippings is the usual choice. Creating it in Obsidian first means the vault has already indexed it when the first file arrives.
2. Right-click the extension icon, choose Options, and set the destination to a folder on disk. Press Choose folder and navigate to your vault, then to Clippings inside it.
3. Chrome asks whether the extension may edit files in that folder. Allow it. The grant is stored for that browser profile and survives restarts and browser updates; nothing outside the folder is reachable.
4. Set the filename template to {date}-{title}. Obsidian sorts a folder by name, so a dated prefix makes the folder chronological without a plugin, and it keeps two clips of the same page apart.
5. Turn on the frontmatter fields you want: title, source, author, date and extraction. All five render in the Properties panel, and source becomes a clickable link back to the page.
6. Set what the icon click does to “save to folder”, so a clip opens no window at all – one keystroke, one file.
7. Add per-site rules for the sites you clip most – a URL pattern gets its own subfolder, so discussion threads and documentation stop landing in the same pile.

Settings for a vault

These values assume the vault is your main note store rather than a scratch folder – which changes what the filename has to carry and which fields are worth keeping.

---
title: "Why I moved back to plain text notes"
source: "https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/…"
date: "2026-04-02T18:41:00.000Z"
extraction: "dom"
---

**u/quietfiles** (412 points)

Five years of app migrations taught me that the format outlives the app.

> **u/mdsceptic** (88 points)
> Until you need backlinks across ten thousand files.

> > **u/quietfiles** (140 points)
> > `grep -rl "[[topic]]" .` is not elegant, but it has never failed.

Three ways it plays out

A morning of reading, filed with Obsidian closed

You go through six tabs before the first meeting, pressing Alt+Shift+M on each. Obsidian is not running. The browser writes the files directly through the File System Access API, so there is nothing to be open. No window appears, no dialogue interrupts, and the six pages are .md files in Clippings before you have finished the coffee.

You open the vault at lunchtime and all six are indexed, searchable and showing in the graph. Each one carries the URL it came from, so the tabs can be closed without losing the thread of where anything was found.

A thread that files itself in the right place

You have a rule for reddit.com pointing at Clippings/threads, with the author field switched off because a thread has no single one. You clip a discussion about note-taking workflows. It lands in threads, not in the main pile, with the nested comments as nested blockquotes and each score attached.

The rule matters most for the sites you clip without thinking. Anything you file by hand you eventually stop filing; anything the pattern files stays filed, including the clips you take in a hurry.

A clip that turns into a permanent note

A clipped article sits in Clippings with its source in the header. You write your own thinking underneath it in the same file, link it into a map of content with [[wikilinks]], and the file becomes yours without losing the record of where the raw material came from.

Because the filename was set by template on the first day, those links do not break. Renaming clipped notes to make them linkable is the work the template removes – and it is work that only shows up once the vault is large enough for it to hurt.

Against the other routes into a vault

There are four common ways to get a web page into Obsidian and each of them works. What differs is how many parts have to keep working.

When the file is not where you expected

The clip saved, but Obsidian does not show it

Obsidian reads the vault folder rather than watching it continuously, so a file written while the app is in the background can take a moment to appear; switching to it is usually enough. If it still is not there, check the granted folder in the settings. It is easy to grant the vault’s parent directory instead of the vault itself, in which case the file is a level above and outside the vault entirely.

Chrome is asking for the folder again

The grant belongs to one browser profile. A second profile, a guest window, an incognito window or a “clear site data” sweep all drop it, and so does moving the vault to a different path. Re-granting takes one dialogue; there is no account behind it that could carry the permission from one machine to another.

The images are broken when I am offline

They are links, not files. The extension downloads no binary assets, so a note in the vault points at the pictures on the original site and shows nothing without a connection – and shows nothing ever if the site removes them. If a note has to be self-contained, save the images yourself or set images to “skip” so the note does not promise pictures it cannot show.

The date property is empty

The page declared no publication date in its markup. The field is left empty rather than filled with the day you clipped, because a wrong date in the Properties panel sorts, filters and misleads exactly like a right one. The clip date is available separately, through {date} in the filename template.

Where it stops

It cannot touch anything outside the folder you granted, and it cannot read your existing notes. It does not sync, resolve wiki-links or create backlinks. It writes a file and stops there. It does not download images, so a note is not self-contained offline – the links still point at the original site. And the folder grant belongs to one browser profile, so a second computer needs its own.

Questions