Properties

Properties allow you to organize information about a note. Properties contain structured data such as text, links, dates, checkboxes, and numbers. Properties can also be used in combination with Community plugins that can do useful things with your structured data.

There are several ways to add a property to a note:

Once you add a property, a row will appear at the top of the file with two inputs: the property name and the property value.

For the name, you can choose anything you like. Obsidian provides several default properties: tags, cssclasses, and aliases.

Once you choose the property name, you can give it a value.

In addition to a name and value, properties also have a type. A property's type determines what kind of values it can store and how Obsidian handles them. To change the type of a property, click the type icon next to the property name and select a different option. You can also manage property types using the Properties view core plugin.

Obsidian supports the following property types:

Once a property type is assigned to a property name, all properties with that name across your vault will use the same type.

Properties have their own search syntax that you can use alongside other search terms and operators. See search syntax for properties.

You can add properties to Templates.

When you insert a template into the active note, all the properties from the template will be added to the note. Obsidian will also merge any properties that exist in your note with properties in the template.

You can rename a property by right-clicking it in the All properties view.

You can change how properties are displayed in your note by going to Settings → Editor → Properties in document. The options are:

You can use CSS snippets to change the appearance of specific notes.

A few features are not currently supported in Obsidian:

When a property is focused

Properties are stored in YAML format at the top of the file. YAML is a popular format that is easy for both humans and computers to read.

Property names are separated from their values by a colon followed by a space:

While the order of each name-value pair doesn't matter, each name must be unique within a note. For example, you can't have more than one tags property.

Values can be text, numbers, checkboxes, dates, dates and times, or lists.

Text properties contain a single line of text. Markdown formatting is not rendered in text properties. Hashtags do not create tags when used in text properties.

Text properties can contain URLs and Internal links using the [[Link]] syntax. Internal links in text properties must be surrounded with quotes. Obsidian will automatically add these if you manually enter internal links into properties, but be careful to add them when using templating plugins.

List properties contain multiple values. Each value in a list appears on its own line, preceded by a hyphen (-) and a space.

List values can contain text, numbers, and Internal links. When using Internal links in list properties, surround them with quotes.

Number type properties must always be a literal number, not an expression with operators. Integers and decimals are both allowed.

Checkbox properties are either true or false. In Live Preview, this displays as a checkbox.

Date properties are stored in the following format:

The date picker follows your operating system's default date and time format. You can change it in your system preferences:

With the Daily notes plugin enabled, the date property will additionally function as an internal link to the corresponding daily note for that date.

Date & time properties include both a date and a specific time, stored in the following format:

Like date properties, the date and time picker follows your operating system's default format. You can change it in your system preferences.

Tags properties are a special property type used exclusively by the tags property. This property type cannot be assigned to other properties.

Tags properties are formatted as a list, with each tag on its own line preceded by a hyphen (-) and a space.

The tags property is one of Obsidian's Default properties. See Tags for more information about using tags in Obsidian.

While we recommend using YAML to define properties, you can also define properties using JSON:

Note that the JSON block will be read, interpreted, and saved as YAML.

Obsidian comes with a set of default properties:

The following default properties can be used with Obsidian Publish:

These properties were deprecated in Obsidian 1.4 and should be replaced with their modern equivalents. Support for them as Default properties is dropped in Obsidian 1.9.