Import from Obsidian
Soot imports a copy of your Obsidian vault, the folder Obsidian keeps your notes in, with no export needed. Your folders, pictures and files come across in one go, and the links between your notes keep working.
On iPhone or iPad? You’ll need a Mac to import your notes. With Soot Pro, they’ll then sync to your iPhone and iPad.
Your notes in Obsidian aren’t changed, and nothing in Soot is overwritten. Soot makes its own copy of your notes, and the two aren’t linked: anything you change in Obsidian afterwards stays in Obsidian. If a note you’re importing has the same name as one already in the destination folder in Soot, it’s left out and listed under Import details.
Step by step
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In Soot, choose File ▸ Import Notes…
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Drag your Obsidian vault into the Import Notes window, or click Choose Folder… and pick it.
Choose the Obsidian vault itself, not a folder inside it, so your pictures can be found. If you pick a folder inside it, Soot asks for the Obsidian vault. To find your Obsidian vault, click its name at the bottom of Obsidian’s sidebar and choose Manage vaults…, then Reveal in Finder from the vault’s menu.
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Untick any notes or folders you don’t want.
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Under Import into, choose where your notes and folders go. Leave it on Library to put them at the top level of your library, as they were in your Obsidian vault. To keep everything from Obsidian inside one folder, make that folder first with File ▸ New Folder…, then choose it here.
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If you see Use titles from properties, leave it off to use filenames as note titles, as Obsidian does. Turn it on to use each note’s
title:property instead, where it has one. Notes without one keep their filename as their title. The option appears when some of your notes have a title property, often added by Obsidian’s Web Clipper.
Stand-in: the Import Notes window on an Obsidian vault goes here, showing its folders, Import into and Use titles from properties. -
Click Import. The button shows how many notes you’ve ticked.
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Check Import details. It lists:
- Links to pictures or notes that aren’t in your Obsidian vault. The links are kept unchanged, so you can fix them in Soot.
- Links that could point to more than one note. Soot links to the first matching note it finds. Follow the link in Soot to check that it opens the note you meant.
- Notes left out because one with the same name was already there. To bring one in anyway, change the title of the note already in Soot, then import again with only that note ticked.
What comes across
- Your folders and notes. Each note’s title is its filename, as in Obsidian, unless you chose Use titles from properties.
- Links between your notes, including
[[wikilinks]]and links to headings. They become ordinary links, which work in Soot and in other apps. - Pictures, PDFs and other files, with the notes that use them. Photos larger than 2048 pixels on their longest side are scaled down to that size and saved as JPEG.
- Tags, which work as tags in Soot.
- Properties at the top of a note, which Soot shows in the note’s details rather than in its text.
Obsidian’s settings, plugins and trash stay behind. Soot doesn’t draw highlights (==text==), maths or Mermaid diagrams. They stay in your notes as you typed them, so nothing is lost.
Having trouble? Email hello at sootsync dot com and I’ll help.